Every year, hundreds of thousands of people dream of studying or doing research in the United States, and for them, a student visa is like a golden ticket. But now, for hundreds of students already in US colleges and universities, that ticket is turning into a one-way trip back home. The Trump administration is pushing hard to revoke visas and send academics out of the country, whether they go willingly or in handcuffs.
US visa programs are complicated, with lots of rules and requirements, and the State Department says it has a lot of power to take them away.
How Do Student Visas Work?
Coming to the US for anything other than a vacation usually means dealing with many different types of visas, more than two dozen for people who don’t want to live in the US forever.
But only three types are for people from other countries who want to study in the US. An F-1 visa is for students going to a school like a high school or college. The less common M-1 visa is for students in a job training program.
To take students with these visas, a school has to be approved by the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) through the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP).
In its arguments with Harvard University, the Trump administration has threatened to take away Harvard’s SEVP approval unless the university gives the Department of Homeland Security detailed records of its international students’ behavior – part of a bigger plan to make top US colleges follow its political ideas. If Harvard loses its approval, it won’t be able to take students on F-1 visas, and students already there would have to transfer to another US school.
Also, many people come to the US for education on a J-1 “exchange visitor” visa. This includes not just studying but also a “cultural part” overseen by a US organization approved by the State Department, which includes thousands of schools. Professors, researchers, and doctors usually come on J-1 visas.
Even though it has more rules than the F-1 visa, some students like the J-1 because it lets their spouses work in the US, says Lisa Murray, exchange program director with the non-profit American Immigration Council.
“Many good scholarships, fellowships, or grants are only for people with J-1 visas,” Murray told CNN.
All three types of education visas use a government online system called SEVIS (Student and Exchange Visitor Information System) that lets schools give required information to the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security about international students. This includes the student’s address and proof of their schoolwork.
“US colleges take their responsibility to enroll international students and follow SEVP rules very seriously and know what happens if they don’t,” said Fanta Aw, CEO of the non-profit Association of International Educators, in a statement.
“Schools have rules and ways to handle student behavior that might lead to ending a student’s SEVIS record, as SEVP says, just like there are reasons for the government or the school to take away its approval.”
When Can a Student Visa Be Taken Away?
While a person’s legal status – their ability to stay in the US – is decided by US Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of the Department of Homeland Security, visas are given by the State Department and can be taken away for many reasons, including breaking laws and lying on an application. The State Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual says a visa holder doesn’t have to be officially charged with a crime before their visa can be ended.
“The Department can take away a visa when it gets bad information from another US government agency, including intelligence or law enforcement,” the manual says.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has taken away hundreds of visas using a rarely used rule that allows for taking them away if a person’s presence in the US “would have serious bad effects on US foreign policy.”
It seems there’s a two-step system to make students leave the country quickly. First, the State Department takes away the visa, then ICE tells the student to leave right away or, in some cases, finds and arrests them.
Tufts University doctoral candidate Rümeysa Öztürk was stopped last month by federal agents on a street in Somerville, Massachusetts, and handcuffed while she screamed in fear and confusion, as seen in video watched around the world. Even though Öztürk’s F-1 visa had been taken away four days earlier, she didn’t know about it before her arrest, says a court document filed by her lawyers in Boston.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said Öztürk was “doing things to support Hamas,” without saying what those things were. Her lawyers say she’s being unfairly punished for speaking up for Palestinian rights.
Many foreign students now facing deportation say they haven’t done anything criminal or controversial in the US other than publicly support the Palestinian cause in the war between Israel and Hamas.
And orders to remove students aren’t just for visa holders. Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Madawi, pro-Palestinian activists at Columbia University, are now fighting deportation after the State Department ordered their permanent legal resident status (green card) to be taken away, and they were arrested in March and April.
Reasons for Sending Students Away Go Beyond Protests
More than 100 international students whose visas have been taken away say the government is “taking away their ability to study and work in the US and putting them at risk of arrest, detention, and deportation,” according to a lawsuit filed in their name in federal court in Georgia.
Some of the students targeted never protested or were charged with a crime, says their lawyer Dustin Baxter.
“They would take away the student visa even if there was no conviction, if there was just an arrest, and sometimes there wasn’t even an arrest, just a meeting and maybe a ticket,” Baxter said.
Some foreign students say their first notice about their visa being taken away came from their school, not ICE. Meanwhile, many universities didn’t get any official notice and only found out by seeing a student’s name in government records, school officials say.
After four students and two recent graduates of Stanford University had their student visas taken away, the “University found out about the revocations during a routine check of the SEVIS database,” it said in a statement on April 4.
An immigration lawyer told CNN that this is a big change from how the system used to be used.
“Before Trump took office, it was up to school officials to start that revocation in SEVIS,” said Jeff Joseph, president-elect of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “Now we’re seeing ICE do it themselves.”
Government Warns Students They’re Being Watched
Since Trump’s second term began, the administration has warned that the government is watching people living in the US on visas.
“US visa screening doesn’t stop after a visa is given,” the State Department said in a Facebook post in March. “We keep checking visa holders to make sure they follow all US laws and immigration rules – and we’ll take away their visas and deport them if they don’t.”
Usually, when an exchange visitor visa expires, it doesn’t mean a person is immediately considered to be in the country illegally. In fact, the State Department’s website says to J-1 visa holders, “If your visa has expired and you don’t plan to travel outside the US, you don’t need to renew the visa.” ICE tells F-1 visa holders, “You can stay in the United States on an expired F-1 visa as long as you keep your student status.”
But many students who have been told by email by the Department of Homeland Security that their visas were taken away are getting the message that they have to “self-deport” within seven days if they want to avoid being arrested.
“Don’t try to stay in the United States. The federal government will find you,” one such email says, according to Boston immigration lawyer Nicole Micheroni, who said she received the message apparently intended for a client.
While Rubio has publicly talked about taking away student visas, the State Department has been quiet about individual cases.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio attends a news conference in March in Kingston, Jamaica. Nathan Howard/Reuters
“Because of privacy and visa confidentiality, we generally don’t comment on Department actions in specific cases,” an agency spokesperson told CNN in response to questions about several cases.
Before a person in ICE custody can be deported, several steps can be taken, including appealing to the Board of Immigration Appeals. But the Supreme Court ruled in 2024 that visa revocations are almost never appealable.
“Congress gave the Secretary (of State) a lot of power to take away an approved visa petition ‘at any time, for what he deems to be good and sufficient cause,'” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote.
A student visa holder who “breaks a rule or condition” of their legal status can’t apply for another visa until being out of the country for at least five years, according to State Department guidelines.
How Many Student Visas Does the US Approve?
Hundreds of thousands of new student visas are approved every year, according to the State Department, many of them for people extending existing visas or changing to a different type of visa as their education changes.
Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a kidney specialist and an associate professor at Brown University, was deported in March after ICE said she returned to the US from a trip to her native Iran, where she attended the funeral of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Alawieh originally came to the US on a J-1 visa to study at three American universities over six years but changed to an H-1B visa for skilled workers when she took the position at Brown, according to a court document filed by her lawyers.
The total number of student visas given out peaked in 2015, when almost 1 million visas were approved. Approvals for F-1 visas dropped 27% the next year, according to State Department numbers, then barely reached six figures in 2020, when Covid travel restrictions and a temporary stop in processing at embassies and consulates caused the numbers to plummet.
Student visa approvals have gone back to pre-Covid levels, but 2024 numbers were still less than three-quarters of the 2015 record. Hundreds of colleges said that the “social and political environment” in the US, as well as “feeling unwelcome,” were reasons for declining international student enrollment during the first Trump administration, the non-profit Institute of International Education found.
Trump’s attitude towards international students has changed a lot since he first thought about running for president.
“When foreigners attend our great colleges & want to stay in the US, they should not be thrown out of our country,” Trump tweeted in August 2015.
A decade later, his administration has canceled more than 1,000 scholars’ visas – and the number is still growing.
