Trump Threatened to Revoke Visas of Students Who Dissent. Where’s the Pushback?

On February 2, the leaders of nearly 50 U.S. universities sent a bold open letter to President Donald Trump.

“We write as presidents of leading American colleges and universities to urge you to rectify or rescind the recent executive order,” the letter stated. “If left in place, the order threatens both American higher education and the defining principles of our country.”

If only this pushback had occurred in more recent memory. Those words are from a letter sent not this year, in response to the multiple attacks on academic freedom that Trump has issued in his second term, but in February 2017 — in response to Trump’s ban on immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. This year, despite the president’s brazen January 29 executive order to revoke the visas of students involved in Palestine solidarity protests, those same universities have remained largely silent

It’s hardly surprising. While many of the policies issued in Trump’s first administration provoked abundant and full-throated public opposition from liberal institutions, his second term has been marked by spineless compliance at best — and tacit endorsement at worst.

Trump’s order, which he signed under the guise of “combating antisemitism,” directs universities to “monitor for and report activities” by international students and staff following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. While the order doesn’t explicitly call for deportation, an accompanying fact sheet issued the following day makes Trump’s aims clear. Falsely dubbing all international students who participated in Palestine solidarity protests “pro-jihadist,” the president promises to “find,” “deport,” and “quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses,” adding that colleges and universities “have been infested with radicalism like never before.” Of course, Trump and other supporters of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza have frequently deployed the term “Hamas sympathizer” to shut down any and all critique of the Israeli military.

While the order doesn’t explicitly call for deportation, an accompanying fact sheet issued the following day makes Trump’s aims clear.

Such a deliberate incursion on the autonomy of university decisions should spark alarm from institutional leaders. But Trump’s order is not the first time that international students on F-1 visas have been threatened with deportation. And in past years, that threat was actually issued by the universities themselves.

Take 2017, for instance, when SEIU Local 1 began organizing graduate students at Washington University in St. Louis. Amid the mounting unionization campaign, the school’s provost sent an email to graduate students with a list of frequently asked questions, including whether a strike would impact an international student’s F-1 visa status. Yes, the university said, if the union were to go on strike, “all foreign students will lose their visas and have to leave the country.” What’s more, the email made a point to highlight that “universities are legally required to report to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] … if a student fails to maintain status,” effectively threatening graduate students who choose to strike with deportation.

The memo failed to mention that it’s the university itself that has authority over whether striking F-1 visa holders lose their student status — not ICE. If the student is suspended and loses their status then, yes, their visa would be in jeopardy. But as a 2017 article in The Nation noted, “for the university to revoke student status because of a strike or other action relating to unionization would be a clear violation of federal labor law.”

Nevertheless, similar talking points have been repeated over the years by a range of universities, particularly in the wake of the National Labor Relations Board’s August 2016 ruling that graduate students at private universities are classified as employees and can therefore unionize. That year, Columbia’s provost went so far as to publish an op-ed in the campus newspaper aimed at dissuading international students from joining a campaign to unionize with the United Auto Workers, citing the union’s opposition to an expansion of the H-1B visa program.

“I have had moments wondering if I should rock the boat in any way,” Sneha Narayan, a graduate student from India, told The Daily Northwestern in 2017 during Northwestern’s unionization effort. “We have a lot to lose because our visa status is entirely dependent on if we are enrolled in the University.”

International students’ vulnerability to deportation has once again come into sharp relief amid campus protests for Gaza. Last fall, Cornell planned to suspend Momodou Taal, a political economy Ph.D. student from the United Kingdom, for shutting down a career fair attended by defense contractors L3Harris and Boeing. An article in The Cornell Daily Sun said that a school administrator notified Taal his F-1 visa would be terminated, as he was suspended earlier that year as well for organizing a Palestine solidarity encampment on the quad. Facing public backlash to Taal’s imminent deportation, Cornell ultimately decided not to disenroll him.

Trump’s executive order lays bare something we already knew: Immigration status is an effective cudgel against the people and protesters who challenge an institution’s bottom line.

Emboldened by Trump’s executive order, networks of parents and alumni at Columbia and New York University have also leapt at the chance to get international students deported, reporting by The Intercept has revealed. In a Facebook group misleadingly titled “Mothers Against College Antisemitism,” Elizabeth Rand, an NYU parent and attorney, boasted that the group’s communications with administrators have played a direct role in getting the university to take more aggressive action against students protesting Israel’s war on Gaza. In a WhatsApp group called Columbia Alumni for Israel, a former assistant professor at Columbia Teachers College wrote, “identifying the Columbia student-Hamas-sympathizers who show up is key to deporting those with student visas.”

Trump’s executive order lays bare something we already knew: Immigration status is an effective cudgel against the people and protesters who challenge an institution’s bottom line. Whether exercising their First Amendment right to protest or engaging in unionization activities protected by federal labor law, international students have long been vulnerable to the whims of university leaders who seek to use their visas as leverage over them.

Perhaps, then, I should end by reminding those leaders of their own words. Here’s that 2017 letter again:

“American higher education has benefited tremendously from this country’s long history of embracing immigrants from around the world. Their innovations and scholarship have enhanced American learning, added to our prosperity, and enriched our culture. … This executive order is dimming the lamp of liberty and staining the country’s reputation.”