International students across the country are on edge after a week of arrests, deportations and escalating threats from the Trump administration.
So far the administration’s sights have been set primarily on Columbia University in New York. On March 8, immigration officials arrested recent graduate Mahmoud Khalil, intending to strip him of his green card and deport him for his role in pro-Palestinian campus protests last year. Over the next week, Department of Homeland Security agents raided students’ dorm rooms, arresting one international student and prompting another to flee to Canada.
Elora Mukherjee, a law professor at Columbia and director of its Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, said international students have been flocking to the clinic for guidance: on whether their visas could suddenly be revoked, or if they should avoid traveling, delete their social media accounts or move off campus to make it harder for immigration officials to find them.
She said she’s never seen anything like it.
“Our clinic has been inundated with requests for legal consultation,” she said. “There is a palpable sense of fear among international students on campus.”
Mukherjee said she’s been trying to quell international students’ anxieties. But in the wake of what she called an “unprecedented assault on due process, First Amendment rights and basic human decency,” she isn’t sure how.
“They are worried about what may happen to their student visas. They are concerned that they may not be able to complete their degree programs if they are targeted. They’re wondering how they can make changes to their daily life to reduce the risk,” she said. “I don’t know what I can reassure them of right now.”
Chief among the threats facing international students is the equation of protest activity and other protected speech with “terrorist activity.” In an interview with The Free Press last Monday, an unnamed White House official said that protesting made Khalil a national security threat, justifying his deportation. That strategy, the official added, is the administration’s “blueprint” for deporting other international students.
In a post on Truth Social last Tuesday, Trump said that Khalil’s arrest was “the first of many,” calling international student protesters “not students, [but] paid agitators.”
“We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country—never to return again,” Trump wrote. “We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply.”
Stephen Yale-Loehr, a retired Cornell University law professor who specializes in immigration law and international students in particular, said ICE officials’ activity at Columbia is the administration’s opening salvo in a battle against two of its most frequently invoked bogeymen: higher education and immigrants.
“This administration has declared war on immigrants broadly and international students specifically,” he said.
That war is currently centered on Columbia but is likely to spread across higher ed. On Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Face the Nation that the administration plans to continue arresting and deporting international student activists. He added that the government is reviewing and revoking more student visas “every day.”
It’s not clear if the Trump administration’s argument will hold up in court. If it does, experts say it would give the executive nearly unchecked power to deport noncitizens for disfavored speech, and there’s likely to be a fierce legal battle over that question. But international students have very few legal protections, Yale-Loehr said, and the administration has ample leeway to justify deporting them.
“International students have the same constitutional rights as citizens, but immigration statutes are very broad and there are many grounds for deportability that could trip you up, even as a green card holder,” Yale-Loehr said. One of those potential grounds, he said, is donating to an overseas charity that the State Department deems suspicious or linked to terrorist activity—as it’s done with many charities for Palestinian children and families affected by the destruction of Gaza.
“It’s easy for someone to unintentionally or unknowingly violate our immigration laws that way and get put into the deportation process,” Yale-Loehr said.
When asked whether Columbia would protect current students approached by ICE or detained on campus, a university spokesperson pointed to a statement from earlier this month and said students were encouraged to familiarize themselves with university protocol in such cases.
“Columbia is committed to complying with all legal obligations and supporting our student body and campus community,” the statement reads. “We are also committed to the legal rights of our students and urge all members of the community to be respectful of those rights.”
The Trump administration is also considering instituting a travel ban similar to the one implemented during his first administration—except greatly expanded, from seven countries to 43, according to an internal memo circulating among media outlets.
Some college officials are urging students not to travel until the details of such a plan become clear. On Sunday, Brown University advised its international student community, and any noncitizen staff and faculty, to avoid leaving the country or even flying domestically over the upcoming spring break.
“Potential changes in travel restrictions and travel bans, visa procedures and processing, re-entry requirements and other travel-related delays may affect travelers’ ability to return to the U.S. as planned,” executive vice president for planning and policy Russell Carey wrote in a campuswide email.
Jill Allen Murray, deputy executive director for public policy at NAFSA, an association of educators advocating for international students in the U.S., decried the student arrests as authoritarian and said they would have consequences for global views on U.S. colleges.
“We as a nation hold dear freedom of speech and the right to protest. These are the very values that draw students from around the world to our shores,” Murray wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “Americans and international students alike will certainly view this as an alarming attempt to crack down on freedom of expression.”
Mounting a Legal Challenge
Mukherjee said that even for students with longtime visa status or green cards, there are no guarantees. Trump’s invocation of an obscure wartime powers act to justify deporting student protesters, she said, is a “dramatic escalation” in anti-immigrant policy. She’s been cautioning students against appearing at protests or participating in research and academic opportunities abroad.
The Columbia students aren’t the first to face potential deportation over pro-Palestine protests. Momodou Taal, a British graduate student at Cornell, was suspended for his activism last fall, and a university official told him he may need to “depart the U.S.” if his F-1 visa was subsequently nullified.
On Sunday Taal filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration challenging two executive orders that empower immigration officials to deport noncitizens whom they determine to be national security threats. He said that threat amounts to unconstitutional repression of free speech.
“The First Amendment is explicit and clear and extremely lucid in that it’s not protection for citizens alone; it is protection for persons within this country,” Taal told Inside Higher Ed.
Taal successfully avoided deportation last year, but since his name has been well publicized, he’s been anticipating a knock on his door from ICE for weeks. He said that’s partly why he chose to pursue a legal challenge: to use his own vulnerability to try to protect other international students.
“I know a lot of people are afraid … and I have had that fear, certainly, that something will happen to me. But I fundamentally reject the idea of sitting and laying in that fear and doing nothing,” Taal said. “This level of oppression is meant to stop people from talking about Palestine. When free speech is attacked, that is not the time to retreat, but rather double down.”
Taal’s lawsuit joins another challenge to the administration’s deportation strategy. Last week legal advocacy groups filed a petition against Khalil’s arrest, and a federal judge ordered that Khalil be kept in the country while he reviews the case.
‘Much Higher Anxiety’
Even before immigration officials raided dorm rooms, international students, recruiters and the institutions that serve them were anxious about President Trump’s second term.
Last fall, colleges urged international students who had left for winter break to return to the U.S. before Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, fearing a possible travel ban or student visa suspension. Professionals in international student recruiting tell Inside Higher Ed that the crackdown on foreign students has been gradual but is ramping up fast.
William Brustein, former vice president for global strategy and international affairs at West Virginia University, spent decades in international student recruiting and support. He said that international students in the U.S. have grown increasingly worried in recent years about their freedom to express public opinions, what kind of research they can work on, even their physical safety. Khalil’s arrest, he said, validated and escalated those concerns.
“It just reinforces the sense of caution they have about what they can say in class, what they can post online, even what they can say in the cafeteria or around campus if someone is listening,” Brustein said.
Brustein added that colleges have slashed spending on their international support offices, hampering their ability to respond to students’ needs at moments of crisis.
“Colleges have limited resources, and there’s only so much they can do to help,” he said.
Free speech restrictions and ICE raids aren’t the only challenges facing international students in the U.S. The Trump administration has promised to clamp down on approvals for new student visas, and Congress recently passed the Laken Riley Act, significantly lowering the threshold for visa revocation.
Yale-Loehr said that such policies are beginning to manifest at the border. He’s heard stories of students with clearly marked visas in their passports being pulled aside and held for further inspection in airports across the country, some of them turned away by ICE and forced to challenge the decision from abroad.
“In the past, these students would never have been put into secondary inspection,” Yale-Loehr said.
Mukherjee said that while international students faced some of the same issues with visa crackdowns and travel restrictions under the first Trump administration, there is no comparison to the repressive tactics currently on display.
“I’ve never seen a moment where international students are so worried about what may happen to them if they speak out about injustices in our country and across the world,” she said. “It’s an unprecedented time.”