{"id":1872,"date":"2025-05-30T09:30:00","date_gmt":"2025-05-30T09:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/?p=1872"},"modified":"2025-06-01T12:07:33","modified_gmt":"2025-06-01T12:07:33","slug":"international-students-in-chaos-as-trump-broadens-attacks-on-visas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/30\/international-students-in-chaos-as-trump-broadens-attacks-on-visas\/","title":{"rendered":"International students in chaos as Trump broadens attacks on visas"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Trump administration keeps shifting the battleground over international students’ visas as it pulls more and more government levers to crack down on the group.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

What started with allegedly combating campus antisemitism by going after pro-Palestinian activists has escalated into attempts to take away all of Harvard University\u2019s foreign students, threats to cap international student admissions at 15 percent at all colleges and Secretary of State Marco Rubio announcing he would “aggressively revoke visas” for Chinese students.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The moving goalposts<\/a> are difficult to navigate for students and universities and could do long-term damage to a process that experts say brings minds and money to U.S. shores while exporting American values and culture.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI think he has multiple legitimate motives for taking the actions he’s taking, and that those motives are at least in some ways connected. There’s a general theme that underlies them. And the general theme is that that Trump appears concerned that a segment \u2014 not the average, but a segment \u2014 of international students are coming for political purposes, not educational or scientific ones,\u201d said Jay Greene, senior research fellow in the\u00a0Center for Education Policy\u00a0at\u00a0the right-leaning Heritage Foundation. \u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

President Trump has made cracking down on immigration one of his signature agenda items, though the moves against student visas in particular started off comparatively small, with the administration going after pro-Palestinian protesters it accuses of supporting Hamas and posing a threat to U.S. foreign policy.<\/p>\n

But then Trump’s more specific animus toward Harvard found a new outlet, with the Department of Homeland Security trying to take away the university’s ability to enroll international students and ordering those now at the school \u2014 some 27 percent of its student body \u2014 to transfer. Harvard quickly won an emergency court ruling to block that order. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the administration Tuesday<\/a> ordered U.S. embassies and consulates around the world to halt student visa interviews while it weighs increased screening and vetting procedures.<\/p>\n

And then Trump on Wednesday floated a “cap of maybe around 15 percent” for the portion of campus populations made up of foreign-born scholars, while Rubio that same day announced a crackdown on Chinese student visas in particular.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll these policy actions and statements are interconnected,\u201d\u00a0said Miriam Feldblum, president and CEO of the Presidents\u2019 Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration.\u00a0\u201cSo some are directed towards students, but what you also see is that other kind of levers are directed towards institutions.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Feldblum said the combination of surprising policies and threats is \u201ccausing chaos and uncertainty and volatility,\u201d and schools \u201cdo not have the tools or the information or the partnership with the government\u201d to be able to comply with directives while also supporting students.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are in a situation in which significant damage has already been done, and we can see outlooks for greater chaos in the future,\u201d she added.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Hill has reached out to the White House for further comment.<\/p>\n

“We have people [who] want to go to Harvard and other schools, [but] they can\u2019t get in because we have foreign students there,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “But I want to make sure that the foreign students are people that can love our country. We don\u2019t want to see shopping centers exploding. We don\u2019t want to see the kind of riots that you had.”<\/p>\n

“And I\u2019ll tell you what, many of those students didn\u2019t go anywhere. Many of those students were troublemakers caused by the radical left lunatics in this country,” he added. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Harvard has shown it is possible to freeze the administration’s moves in court, at least temporarily, but the international scholar system is a delicate one, and many are already reconsidering plans to study in the U.S.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf it doesn’t get reversed quickly enough, it can mean that for so many students who have already accepted offers, that they may not be able to come in time to start the fall semester. So, this is an urgent matter for the administration to address,\u201d Feldblum said. \u00a0<\/p>\n

A court filing from Harvard\u2019s director of immigration services said some foreign students are looking to transfer and others declined offers to go to Harvard over the Trump administration\u2019s attacks. The filing added that colleges in other countries are already stepping in to recruit the scholars, warning of a potential brain drain.<\/p>\n

Greene said he doesn’t expect the Trump administration to stop until universities can \u201cdemonstrate that they were willing and able to enforce their rules regarding misconduct in a uniform way, applying to all students and readily reporting misconduct by international students to the administration.”<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reason why the Trump administration demanded disciplinary records is because they had reason to believe that students were not being punished in normal ways for fear that they would be deported, for fear that they would have their visas revoke,\u201d he said, citing a report from a House committee that found some students referred for disciplinary action were not suspended.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd so, that’s unusual, and that suggests that perhaps they were behaving as [a] sanctuary city and concealing this behavior from the federal government,\u201d he added. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Others fear the Trump administration has already indicated where it may go next, with his nominee to lead the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services saying he wants to end the optical practical training program, which allows foreign students to work in the U.S. after graduation. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThat would be devastating, not only for the international students and part of their educational journey and experience in the U.S., but for thousands of employers across the country and communities. This would be devastating in terms of the economic contributions that international students make as they’re working for U.S. companies,\u201d Feldblum said. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Trump administration keeps shifting the battleground over international students’ visas as it pulls more…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1874,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1872"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1872"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1873,"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1872\/revisions\/1873"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thetoptenwebhosts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}