When Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on March 27 that 300 student visas have been revoked as a result of students participating in campus protests, 300 was the discernable number. Now the number of foreign-born students who have had their visas revoked or changed has grown to around 1,200 people — and the number continues to grow.
Rubio’s announcement came after specific arrests of graduates or students on campuses and across the U.S. such as Mahmoud Khalil, Badar Khan Suri, Rumeysa Öztürk, and many others.
Inside Higher Ed, a publication focused on higher education, has been closely monitoring developments in the sector, particularly since Trump took office. One journalist at IHE, Ashley Mowreader, began noticing the wave of headlines about international student visas being revoked at various colleges and universities. So, she began tracking cases to gauge the scale and scope of the issue after becoming aware that the State Department had cited a target of 300 revocations tied to political activism.
As reports trickled in, she compiled a spreadsheet to map where the revocations were occurring. Her colleague Liam Knox, who covers international student issues, had started reaching out to institutions with large international student populations. After speaking to dozens of officials in different schools, he learned the revocations weren’t limited to the schools facing allegations of antisemitism or other political and ideological factors. The revocations were more widespread.
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What began as a small effort to track a few cases quickly expanded, with the number of reported revocations Mowreader gathered and analyzed growing to around 1,200 in over 180 colleges and universities as of April 15. “I was just trying to get a handle on it all and figure out where this is happening and what the trends were, and then it quickly became everywhere to everyone, everything,” Mowreader told Documented.
States like New York, Massachusetts, California, and Texas have seen higher visa revocation numbers, likely due to the density of colleges and students in those states. While public institutions and Ivy Leagues have shared data, many private colleges remain silent, and notification of visa violations are now frequently issued directly by the State Department without input from schools — a shift from the usual process.
To learn more, Documented spoke with Mowreader about the meaning behind the data, and the trends and patterns the data revealed.
What patterns have you seen so far? I saw your LinkedIn post where you shared a snippet of data on 200 students: “86% have no clear reason or rationale attached to their SEVIS (Student and Exchange Visitor Information System) status change; 4% were identified for legal infraction; 3% for political activism, and 6% had violated the terms of their visas,” you wrote. Could you clarify what counts as a “legal infraction” in this context. What does that term include?
It’s a little hard to tell, but basically, when you have an F1 visa, there are a few different requirements. For example, you have to maintain student status at your institution, which typically means 12 credits a term. So a few things like that are reasons why the college or university might deny legal standing to an international student who’s currently in the U.S.
In the same way, the State Department of Homeland Security can decide that a student is not meeting their requirements if they have been found guilty of a crime, or if they’ve committed legal offenses. Of the examples that we’ve seen where we have an actual student or person attached to a reported story, sometimes that’s “your license is expired,” or there was a minor traffic crime on their record.
The gaggle of students that is represented in that number — 6% — the university said that there was some sort of legal infraction on their record, and that’s how the State Department qualified that their SEVIS status was rejected. So we’re not really sure what that means.
Part of the drama with this data collection is that it’s all technically FERPA [Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act] protected data, and so anything that I’m learning has to come directly from the institution or the student themselves disclosing this information. That’s in part why a large number of these cases are considered unclear or the rationale is not given. In addition to that, there’s a large number of colleges and universities that have come out and said, We were not even given a reason [for a student’s visa revocation or change].
So there’s two layers of mystique around it — where sometimes [colleges or universities] are just choosing not to disclose them being the institution [where students have had their status changed or revoked]. And then sometimes the federal government is also choosing not to disclose why they’ve revoked a student status.
For those that have no clear reason or rationale attached to their service status change, what typically is the information they are told or that gets displayed or emailed to them?
Typically, there’s three categories that a student would hear from the State Department as to why their student status may be revoked.
One of those, as we’ve mentioned, is a legal infraction or some sort of run in with the law that makes them ineligible for a student status. Another is losing their student standing as an enrollment classification. Typically, that communication comes first from the school and then from the State Department. Then there’s a very broad, sweeping other category, where a student’s status could be changed for some unknown third reason, and that’s the rationale that the State Department is using right now to cancel a lot of the visas. This sort of bigger idea of other justified causes could be in this umbrella, which makes it harder for the student and the institution to respond, because it’s not clear where that came from.
When you wrote that, for 6% of people in that data snippet, they had violated the terms of their visas. What does that typically cover?
That could be something where the students weren’t taking enough classes and they were taking online classes — something to do with the F1 status.
Another thing is that some of these [international] students are on OPT, which is an Optional Practical Training program [Editor’s note: OPT is similar to an internship or job and is typically done upon completion of a student’s degree, enabling them to acquire work experiences for a limited duration of time in the U.S.]. So they could perhaps not actually be participating in it. So, “violating the terms of their visas” could be some sort of rationale like that, where their student status is put into question as a result.
It seems to me that these types of visa infractions — like not maintaining F-1 status or overstaying after failing to use OPT — could happen under any presidential administration. They are standard immigration violations, unlike actions targeting students for political activism, such as student-led protests against the war in Gaza.
So, those could still happen [regardless of this administration]. The interesting thing that is happening, though, is this timeline of progression.
If a student is violating the terms of their visa — that terminology specifically came up at UCLA, as revealed in a report by The Daily Bruin — typically, what happens is that the college or university would flag them in their own internal systems and probably have some sort of dialogue with the student. Then it would move into the SEVIS status, and then the State Department would — responding to that — cancel their student status. So, it typically happens first from the institution, and then it moves down the pipeline.
What’s happening now is that the institution is sort of being skipped over, where the State Department will reach out directly to the student and say, we’ve decided that your student status is no longer eligible. So they’ll receive that via text or email, and then the student will report it to the institution and say, ‘What the heck is happening here?’
So [the current trend as it stands] is basically cutting out higher education as being a partner in maintaining the students eligibility or legal standing. Most people who work in international student affairs, in whatever capacity, say this is atypical and they’ve literally never seen it before.
I heard one legal expert say that they had perhaps four of these cases ever in their life where a student was unaware that their legal standing or that their visa terms had been violated, and it came directly from the State Department.
So, yes, it’s correct to say that any administration could do this — and maybe has done this — but the scale, the scope and the general unclear rationale why is sort of what makes this a very unusual case. There’s just a real lack of clarity as to what this process all entails.
Thanks for pointing that out. Have you noticed any geographic patterns in the data? Maybe differences between states or coasts? For example, when I looked into New York, I found 67 documented cases of student visa revocations, excluding Fordham and the Rochester Institute of Technology, which only listed vague numbers like “some” or “several” student visas have been revoked. It made me wonder if certain states are seeing higher numbers than others, or other patterns you may have noticed.
Some states have more colleges and universities. For example, Massachusetts, per capita, has more colleges and universities than Wyoming. So, there are some regional trends that I’m seeing for sure, where for example, Northeastern had like 40-some-odd visas removed, and that is a lot, but it’s also a very large institution, and they have an online presence, and there’s graduate programs, and things like that.
California and Texas have seen quite a few visa removals. I think The University of Texas System came out yesterday and said upwards of 30 students. So that has been significant. Again, Massachusetts, a large number. Similarly, New York has seen some large numbers, but they also just have more students.
What did you learn about small private liberal arts colleges with large international student populations?
The other hard element of this data collection is that there’s a lot of small private liberal arts colleges that have a large international student population who have not disclosed their numbers yet. A lot of what I’m seeing right now is big state institutions who are more likely to be FOIA’d or more likely to have large newsrooms door knocking and asking for this data. But there are so many smaller institutions that we know of, either off the record or sort of rumored, that have not come forth and said this.
My hypothesis is they don’t want to hurt their international student enrollment. They don’t want to disclose that this might be an issue, because they rely really heavily on international student tuition dollars to subsidize domestic student costs. That’s, again, my working theory.
So for example, Pennsylvania has a large number of private liberal arts colleges that really prioritize global education and want international students to come and study there. I haven’t seen them come forth with their numbers yet. So I think right now, what we’re seeing is large public institutions, the Ivy Leagues, have all come forward and said their numbers, but there still is a level of discretion that some colleges are showing where they’re not choosing to share, either because they don’t have to, or because they don’t want to frighten anybody with what’s happening.
Did anything surprise you the most in gathering this data?
While I’ve seen some colleges and universities being very proactive — as soon as they know things, they’re sharing it with their student newsroom, with their team, they’ve got regular federal updates, emails that go out — others have been a lot slower or a lot more careful about what they’re sharing.
For example, there’s a large number of colleges on my list who won’t disclose the total number, and I don’t know why that is, or who they’re protecting, or what information they think is more private than others. A lot of mystery surrounds this story.
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How about the nationalities of students whose visas have been revoked?
I think another factor people have been asking me a lot about is student nationality. Like, do I see any trends in whose visas are getting revoked? Yes and no. We do know that there’s more Chinese and Indian students studying in the U.S. than any other nation. So, in some ways, the data is pointing to large numbers of those students. But they are overrepresented in most data. So it’s hard to draw trends on things like that as well, because that has been slower to share. It’s a very knotted web that I’m trying to untangle.
This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
