Trump Admin. Says It Revoked 8,000 Student Visas
The Department of State has revoked 8,000 student visas since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, the department shared on the social media site X on Monday, as part of the president’s massive deportation campaign. In total, the administration has revoked 100,000 nonimmigrant visas, the department wrote, which is about double the number revoked in former President Joe Biden’s last year.
According to Fox News, the department said that the majority of the student and specialized worker visas were revoked due to crimes; about half were because of drunk driving. U.S. colleges and universities enroll more than 1 million international students.
“The Trump administration will continue to put America first and protect our nation from foreign nationals who pose a risk to public safety or national security,” State Department spokesperson Timmy Piggott told Fox News.
The Trump administration began suddenly terminating the statuses of international students in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS)—the database that stores international student data—in April without alerting the students or their institutions. (Terminating SEVIS status is technically distinct from revoking a student’s visa but can have similar impacts on a student’s ability to continue studying in the U.S.) In some cases, the terminations appeared to be related to encounters with police where the student was a witness to or even a victim of a crime, rather than a perpetrator.
At the same time, the administration detained a number of international students who had been involved in pro-Palestinian advocacy on their campuses as part of a campaign that a federal judge agreed was ideologically motivated. The SEVIS terminations were eventually reversed and the student activists released.
But the Trump administration’s campaign against international students has since continued, including encouraging colleges to cap the number of international students they enroll and working to change policies to make it more difficult for international students to study in the U.S.
