Immigration officials sent letters to international students on short-term work visas Thursday night, threatening to terminate their legal status in the Student Exchange and Visitor Information System and remove them from the country. The number of affected students is still unknown, but Inside Higher Ed can confirm at least 35.
It’s the first sign that the Trump administration is resuming its campaign to deport student visa holders, weeks after restoring the statuses of thousands of students. ICE recently released an updated policy that significantly expands the agency’s authority to terminate students’ SEVIS status and pave the way for deportation proceedings.
This time, they’re targeting students on Optional Practical Training visas, or OPTs, which allow international postgraduates the opportunity to work in a field relevant to their study on a short-term extension. Students on OPT are allowed a total of 90 days of unemployment every 12 months before falling out of compliance. It’s still not known whether any of the affected students were on a special visa extension known as OPT for STEM, awarded to graduates in high-demand technology, science and engineering fields.
One international student adviser, who spoke with Inside Higher Ed on the condition of anonymity, said 28 of his institution’s students on OPT received the letter in the past day, and he expects that number will grow.
In a copy of one letter received by an international student and obtained by Inside Higher Ed, Immigration and Customs Enforcement warned those who have not reported employment status within 90 days of starting their OPT visa that they must do so in 15 days. If they don’t, the Student Exchange and Visitor Program “will set your SEVIS record to ‘terminated,’” the letter reads, which “may result in the initiation of immigration proceedings to remove you from the United States.”
The letter is nearly identical to those sent by officials during the first Trump administration in 2020. The only difference: Back then, the Student Exchange and Visitor Program was the letter’s sole signatory. This time, ICE and the Department of Homeland Security are also named.
The 2020 letters were sent two years after officials issued an update to designated school officials informing them that the administration had begun a review of OPT students’ employment status to find noncompliant visa holders. But that notice also said SEVP would not automatically terminate students’ SEVIS status for going over the 90-day unemployment limit before notifying students.
It’s not clear whether immigration officials engaged in a review process before beginning to notify students of potential SEVIS terminations this week. Spokespeople for ICE and DHS did not respond to questions in time for publication.
It was also not immediately clear if OPT students’ SEVIS terminations would result in subsequent visa revocations, which are the purview of the State Department. A spokesperson for the State Department wrote in an email that they “cannot preview future visa-related decisions, which are made on a case-by-case basis, based on the individual facts relevant to the case,” and deferred other questions sent by Inside Higher Ed to DHS.
In an internal communication sent to international student advisers and support specialists, NAFSA, an organization of international educators, urged college officials to regularly check the SEVIS database for notices of OPT students’ compliance with “accrued unemployment days” and to reach out to any students who are over the 90-day limit as soon as possible.
Immigration officials began systematically terminating thousands of students’ SEVIS statuses along with their visas in late March, an unprecedented move that threw international student support offices into chaos and left students scrambling to avoid deportation.
Last month, immigration officials restored the SEVIS statuses of more than 5,000 international students after losing dozens of court cases challenging the legality of efforts to revoke foreign students’ legal residency at a breakneck pace.
The anonymous international student adviser said students on OPT often forget to report their employment details before the 90-day deadline. Many are distracted by graduations and finals well after they receive approval for the visa and forget, he said; in other cases, the lapse can be due to technical issues within SEVIS.
Because of that, they’re often given some leeway, and he said he’s never seen or heard of a student having their SEVIS status terminated for not reporting employment details on time, including the last time these letters were sent in 2020. Then again, much of the Trump administration’s treatment of student visa holders is unprecedented, and he’s worried this could be a real danger for them.
“There’s a lot of panic and uncertainty as our students are waiting to see what will happen, and we’re waiting to see if they’ll really go through with it,” he said. “I think this is the real deal.”
Nearly 2,000 students have had their SEVIS records terminated in recent weeks. On Friday, some records began being restored.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | aapsky/iStock/Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Over the past three weeks, several thousand international students received notice that their status in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System was changed, which threatened their legal ability to stay in the country and resulted in some students being detained or self-deporting. But as of late last night, the federal government is reversing course and reinstating students’ SEVIS records.
Elora Mukherjee, director of the Columbia Law School Immigrant Rights Center, first heard Thursday evening that 50 percent of affected students had had their SEVIS records reinstated. At the time, immigration lawyers didn’t know if it would be a blanket reversal.
But Friday morning, a lawyer for the government told a federal judge that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was restoring students’ SEVIS statuses nationwide while ICE develops a policy framework for record terminations. In the meantime, “ICE will not modify the record solely based on the NCIC [National Crime Information Center] finding that resulted in the recent SEVIS record termination,” according to the court filing.
So far, both students who filed lawsuits and those who didn’t have seen records restored, Mukherjee said.
Federal judges across the country have already ordered the government to restore some students’ records in SEVIS, a key database that tracks international students, after those students sued. The judges, for the most part, have expressed skepticism that the terminations were legal. Of the more than 100 lawsuits, judges have granted temporary restraining orders in at least 50 cases, Politico reported.
The sudden terminations have led to widespread confusion and fear for international students. Lawyers said in court filings and interviews that students affected are afraid to leave their homes or have lost out on income because of the terminations, among other consequences.
As of Friday morning, Inside Higher Ed has identified over 1,840 students and recent graduates from more than 280 colleges and universities who have reported SEVIS record shifts. Many institutions didn’t receive clear communication when student records were changed in the first place, making it likely that they won’t receive updates if and when records are restored.
Two colleges have already seen the changes take place. At the University of California, Berkeley, 23 students had their SEVIS statuses changed since April 4, but overnight a dozen students regained their status without warning or explanation, the university’s student paper, The Daily Californian, reported. Stanford University said late on April 24 that one student whose visa was revoked had their record restored.
This reversal doesn’t eliminate harm, Mukherjee noted. A few students elected to self-deport based on communication from the Trump administration or their own colleges and universities. Others were told to stop attending class or working. Among those who did continue their daily lives, a lapse in their SEVIS status could potentially cause them harm in the future, Mukherjee said.
In the policy update shared Friday, government officials provided more clarity about what prompted the sweeping visa revocations: a search in the National Crime Information Center.
Of students who had their SEVIS status changed, many were classified as “OTHER—Individual identified in criminal records check and/or has had their VISA revoked,” according to court filings. Students who did have criminal records were cited for a variety of reasons ranging from driving without a license and overfishing to underage drinking. Some students didn’t have a criminal record at all.
Their suit argues that the thousands of terminations, which to date have left more than 1,800 students without valid status, are “unlawful” and came “without warning, individualised explanation and an opportunity to respond”.
The Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, which advocates for immigrant and international student rights, and several impacted students from institutions such as MIT and Boston University filed the suit in the District Court for the district of Massachusetts yesterday.
Not only have students been forced out of housing, jobs or their chosen institution mere weeks away from graduation, but the Trump administration’s crackdown on international students has “undermined’ institutions’ being able to “attract, retain, and effectively serve” students from overseas, the group warned.
The court is asked to find that the policy is unlawful and unconstitutional, reactivate the SEVIS records of affected students, halt the policy while the case is being fought and “vacate all improper SEVIS terminations”.
President and CEO of the Presidents’ Alliance, Miriam Feldblum, warned that students would be put off from studying in the US because of the “fear and uncertainty diminishing our global competitiveness and reputation”.
“The unlawful termination of student records without due process strikes at the heart of higher education’s mission. Colleges and universities drive innovation, research, and workforce growth by fostering global talent – but they can’t do that when students’ futures are derailed without explanation,” she said.
“These actions deter future students from studying here in the US, and hinder campus administrators from carrying out their work by the arbitrary upending of established regulations and processes.”
Meanwhile, Sirine Shebaya, executive Director at the National Immigration Project – which is representing the Presidents’ Alliance – blasted the policy vas “not only lawless… [but] cruel” – marking “yet another manifestation of policies that fly in the face of both legal standards and common decency”.
These actions deter future students from studying here in the US, and hinder campus administrators from carrying out their work by the arbitrary upending of established regulations and processes Miriam Feldblum, Presidents’ Alliance
While the surge in visa revocations was at first thought to mainly affect students who had expressed pro-Palestinian sympathies, international education stakeholders have been left baffled at a growing number being issued at institutions where no such protests had taken place.
Some students – including one unnamed Boston University graduate represented in the legal case – are reporting that their visas had been taken away due to minor traffic infractions. Others have been left confused after their visas were revoked despite having no criminal history.
Yet the State Department continues to back the policy.
“The Trump administration is focused on protecting our nation and our citizens by upholding the highest standards of national security and public safety through our visa process,” a State Department spokesperson told The PIE News this week.
“The Department of State will continue to work closely with the Department of Homeland Security to enforce zero tolerance for aliens in the United States who violate US laws, threaten public safety, or in other situations where warranted.”
In a significant policy reversal, the Trump administration has begun restoring the legal status of international students whose records were terminated in recent weeks, according to statements made by a Justice Department attorney during a federal court hearing in Oakland, California on Friday.
Elizabeth D. Kurlan, representing the Justice Department, informed the court that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is reactivating student records in the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVIS) system while developing “a framework for status record termination” to guide future policies.
The abrupt reversals began Thursday afternoon when international students and university administrators across the country discovered that many previously terminated records had been unexpectedly restored in the system.
“It’s like somebody flipped a light switch on,” described Jath Shao, a Cleveland-based immigration attorney representing affected students.
The policy change follows weeks of controversy after the administration began revoking visas and terminating the legal status of thousands of international students, particularly targeting those who had participated in political activism or had previous legal infractions such as DUIs.
Higher education institutions have reported varying degrees of reinstatement. At the University of California, Berkeley, 12 of 23 affected international students have had their SEVIS records restored. Similar partial reinstatements have been reported at Rochester Institute of Technology and by attorneys representing students across multiple states.
Despite this development, significant concerns remain for international student populations. Legal experts also caution that terminated status records, even if reinstated, could potentially jeopardize future applications for permanent residency or other immigration benefits.
According to the Justice Department, ICE will continue to maintain authority to terminate records for legitimate violations of nonimmigrant status or other unlawful activity under the Immigration and Nationality Act. However, ICE will not terminate statuses solely based on findings in the National Crime Information Center, a computerized criminal history database that had been used to justify many of the recent terminations.
For higher education institutions, which rely heavily on international student enrollment for both academic diversity and financial stability, the policy reversals offer temporary relief while raising questions about the stability of immigration policies affecting campus communities.
Shao characterized the development as “a small but positive one” while emphasizing that more comprehensive protections are needed to ensure international students’ security within U.S. higher education institutions.
Brittany Charlton (right), a plaintiff in the lawsuit and founding director of the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence at Harvard University, has lost multiple NIH grants amid the Trump administration’s ideological overhaul of the agency.
Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe/Getty Images
Individual university researchers, a public health advocacy organization and a union representing more than 120,000 higher education workers are suing the National Institutes of Health after the agency terminated more than $2.4 billion in grants it claims support “non-scientific” projects that “no longer” effectuate agency priorities.
“Plaintiffs and their members are facing the loss of jobs, staff, and income. Patients enrolled in NIH studies led by Plaintiffs face abrupt cancellations of treatment in which they have invested months of time with no explanation or plan for how to mitigate the harm,” according to a complaint of the lawsuit filed Wednesday afternoon. “As a result of Defendants’ Directives scientific advancement will be delayed, treatments will go undiscovered, human health will be compromised, and lives will be lost.”
It’s the latest in a mounting series of legal challenges against the Trump administration’s blitz of executive actions aimed at rooting out so-called gender ideology; diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives; and alleged waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayer funds. Some of those lawsuits have already resulted in federal judges ordering injunctions and restoration of canceled grants.
But this is one of the first to directly challenge the NIH’s grant cancellations; more legal challenges are expected.
The lawsuit was filed by the American Public Health Association; the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers and NIH-funded medical researchers from Harvard University; the Universities of Michigan and New Mexico; and the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which have all lost their grants. The American Civil Liberties Union is representing the plaintiffs.
A NIH spokesperson said that the agency doesn’t comment on pending litigation.
‘Erosion of Scientific Freedom’
The plaintiffs want the Massachusetts district court to declare the actions of the NIH “unlawful,” restore funding for at least the plaintiffs’ terminated grants and prevent the agency “from terminating any grants based on allegedly no longer effectuating agency priorities, or withholding review of applications.”
The majority of the terminated grants focused on topics related to vaccine hesitancy, climate change, diversifying the biomedical research workforce, “countries of concern” (including China and South Africa), and the health of women, racial minorities and members of the LGBTQ+ community, according to the lawsuit.
One of the plaintiffs, Brittany Charlton, who is the founding director of Harvard University’s LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence, has had five NIH grants terminated since President Donald Trump took office in January and launched a crusade to root out so-called gender ideology and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Charlton said in an email to Inside Higher Ed that she’s lost nearly $6 million in NIH grants as a result of the agency’s directives, signifying “a potential end to my academic career.”
But her motivation for signing on to the lawsuit extends beyond concern for her own livelihood.
“This isn’t just a fight for my professional survival but a stand against the erosion of scientific freedom,” Charlton said. “[The grant cancellations set] a worrying precedent where scientific inquiry becomes vulnerable to political rhetoric. The concern here is not merely academic; it affects the very foundation of public health policy and the health of vulnerable communities.”
Another plaintiff, Katie Edwards, a social work professor at the University of Michigan who researches violence prevention in minority communities, has had six NIH grants pulled this year. And a third plaintiff, Nicole Maphis, a first-generation college student and postdoctoral fellow at the University of New Mexico’s School of Medicine who researches the link between alcohol use and Alzheimer’s, is no longer in consideration for an NIH grant designed to help underrepresented researchers become faculty members.
‘Arbitrary and Capricious’
The lawsuit argues that NIH didn’t have the authority to cancel those or any of the other grants the agency claims no longer effectuate agency priorities. That’s because the “no longer effectuates agency priorities” regulatory language the NIH has cited to justify its termination of particular grants won’t go into effect until October.
Additionally, canceling the grants disregards “Congress’s express mandate that NIH fund research to address health equity and health disparities, include diverse populations in its studies, improve efforts to study the health of gender and sexual minorities, and enhance diversity in the bio-medical research profession,” according to the complaint.
The lawsuit also says that the government violated numerous aspects of the Administrative Procedure Act—including a provision prohibiting agency action considered “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law”—when it terminated the grants. It further asserts that the agency usurped Congress’s “exclusive power over federal spending” and violated the Fifth Amendment by offering “vague” justifications for terminating grants, including involvement with “transgender issues,” “DEI” or “amorphous equity objectives.”
“Defendants have failed to develop any guidelines, definitions, or explanations to avoid arbitrary and capricious decision-making in determining the parameters of the agency’s prohibitions against research with some connection to DEI, gender, and other topics that fail Defendants’ ideological conformity screen,” the suit alleges.
That leaves grantees “unsure, for example, which areas of study they can pursue, which populations they can focus on as study subjects, what they might argue to appeal grant terminations, and what the demographics of study participants must be” and “makes it impossible to determine how to reconfigure future research to stay within the bounds of NIH’s newest ‘priorities.’”
After months of uncertainty about the future of federally funded research, the National Institutes of Health this month started canceling grants it deemed “nonscientific.”
So far, that includes research into preventing HIV/AIDS; managing depressive symptoms in transgender, nonbinary and gender-diverse patients; intimate partner violence during pregnancy; and how cancer affects impoverished Americans.
In letters canceling the grants, the NIH said those and other research projects “no longer [effectuate] agency priorities.”
But the world’s largest funder of biomedical research didn’t stop there. The agency went on to tell researchers that “research programs based primarily on artificial and nonscientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, are antithetical to the scientific inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness,” according to a March 18 letter sent to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
Katie Bogen, a Ph.D. student in the clinical psychology program at UNL, found out via the letter that NIH was canceling the $171,000 grant supporting her dissertation research. She was planning to explore the links between bisexual women’s disclosure of past sexual violence experience to a current romantic partner and subsequent symptoms, including traumatic stress, alcohol use and risk for violence revictimization within their current relationship. She started work on the project last May and was set to start data collection at the end of this month.
The NIH told Bogen and other researchers that “so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion studies are often used to support unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics, which harms the health of Americans,” and that NIH policy moving forward won’t support such research programs.
“No corrective action is possible” for Bogen’s project, because “the premise of this award is incompatible with agency priorities, and no modification of the project could align the project with agency priorities.”
Last week, Bogen, who told Inside Higher Ed that she was inspired to pursue this topic because she herself is a bisexual woman with a trauma history, posted on TikTok about the termination letter.
She received thousands of comments and messages lamenting the loss of her work, with some characterizing the letter’s language as “appalling” and “horrifying.” Another commenter, who identified “as a bi femme who has survived the specific harm you’ve been studying,” told Bogen their “heart is broken” for her and other researchers “and all the folks who could be helped by the studies being defunded.”
Inside Higher Ed interviewed Bogen for more insight into her research and what the NIH’s abrupt cancellation of her and other projects means for public health and the future of scientific discovery.
(This interview has been edited for clarity and style.)
Q: What got you interested in researching intimate partner violence prevention for bisexual women? Why do you believe it’s an important line of scientific inquiry?
A: We know that bisexual women are at an elevated risk of experiencing intimate partner violence and sexual harm. We also know they have higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder after these experiences compared to other people, and that they have greater and more problematic high-risk alcohol use afterwards. A key part of the process of meaning-making after the experience of violence is disclosure because of ambient bi-negativity. Bisexual people’s disclosure processes are often burdened by anti-bisexual prejudice.
For example, if you’re a bisexual woman who’s experienced violence at the hands of a woman partner, and you disclose that to a man partner that you’re seeing now, that man partner might say, “How much did she really hurt you?” If you’re a bisexual woman who’s now with a woman and you disclose violence perpetrated by a man, your woman partner might say something like, “This is what you get for dating men. We all know better than to date men.”
Katie Bogen is a fifth-year clinical psychology Ph.D. student at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln
So much of the disclosure research on sexual violence victims has been done with formal support providers like police or campus security or therapists, and then informal support providers like friends or parents or siblings. But very little research has documented the exposure process with intimate partners, which seems like a gap, given that intimate partners can then choose to sort of wield that insight or knowledge for good—or for harm.
I want to study how to intervene so that they don’t develop severe post-traumatic stress and problematic drinking. And this is particularly important because problem drinking is a risk factor for revictimization, and so bisexual women have all of these factors working against them that contribute to the cycle of revictimization and chronic victimization over their life span.
Q: Can you describe the process of applying for this NIH grant?
A: In 2022, I had just finished my second year of graduate school when a colleague of mine sent me a funding opportunity from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism that had a notice of special interest on the health of bisexual and bisexual-plus people.
We haven’t even been able to recruit our participants and I have none of the data.”
I worked very hard for a year on my application. It was the first grant I wrote as a [principal investigator]. I submitted to NIH, and a kind of miracle happened—I scored a 20 on this grant, which means my very first grant being written up as a PI got funded on the first round of peer review, which is almost unheard-of.
Q: How much of the project had you finished before receiving the termination notice?
A: I started work last May. I’ve hired and trained an entire lab of undergrads.
I’ve already done the literature reviews with the help of my undergraduate team and put together and tested the Qualtrics surveys. We set up backup safety measures in case the online surveys were infiltrated by bots or false respondents. The amount of literature I’ve read and the foundational conference presentations and analysis that I’ve run using other available data sets has been an immense labor.
It has been a productive 10 months. The things that this research has made possible for me—not only as a student and trainee, but as a scientist and as now a mentor helping to train the next generation of scholars—cannot be understated.
But we haven’t even been able to recruit our participants and I have none of the data. We were slated to begin data collection on March 31, and it’s a shame that will no longer happen.
Q: The NIH’s termination letter said your project is “antithetical to scientific inquiry” and “harms the health of Americans.” What was your reaction to that characterization of your work?
A: It hurts to hear that your work isn’t scientific. But it almost made me laugh because it’s so revelatory of the ignorance of folks in positions of power to claim that the work that I’m doing—that my colleagues are doing, that my mentors have taught me to do, that other folks in a field of doing—is ascientific and itself violence.
To me, the language in the letter is an example of DARVO, which is a rhetorical abuse tactic that stands for deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. They’re saying that what I’m doing isn’t scientific, and that they’re actually trying to uphold the standards of science, and by me focusing on these marginalized groups, I’m harming, quote unquote, real or regular Americans.
[The termination letter] almost made me laugh because it’s so revelatory of the ignorance of folks in positions of power to claim that the work that I’m doing … is ascientific and itself violence.”
Q: How does your work benefit society broadly?
A: Even if we take queerness out of the equation in this model, we are still garnering insight and understanding of the mechanism of post-traumatic stress, alcohol use and intimate partner violence for people in general. We’re getting a deeper understanding of how discussing sexual violence with a partner fundamentally changes that relationship, what is perceived as potentially acceptable in that relationship, norms of conflict within that relationship and sexual norms within that relationship.
Being able to investigate questions like this and enact scholarship like this could be a balm to some of the self-blame and shame that survivors are experiencing. And when research like this is able to reach health-care providers, public health improves, people become safer and we’re better able to protect folks from things like intimate partner violence, revictimization and sexual revictimization, which is endemic in our society.
Q: Given that this research grant was a central piece of your plan to complete your dissertation, how does its abrupt cancellation complicate your path toward degree completion?
A: I now have to work with my mentors to generate a new dissertation proposal and send it to my committee and get it reapproved, which means I have to access data sets at my institution that have either already been collected or that are safe from future rounds of cuts like this.
I believe I’m being intimidated [by the NIH] into taking the data that are already available, rather than collecting data with more specificity, which means the accurate data answering these research questions is tampered. I don’t necessarily want to go to a data set that was collected on, for example, masculinity and violence perpetration, and try and string together a similar enough model to pass the proxy of what I wanted. That’s poor scholarship.
It’s something a lot of scholars who are dealing with this crisis are facing now. How does that further marginalize the populations we’re aiming to serve if we’re trying to presume or assume that data on different populations? It creates this ethical and academic quandary.
Q: How might this termination affect your career in the long term?
A: I have a demonstrated record of receiving grant funding on my own, which is a difficult thing to demonstrate when you’re still a trainee or you’re still a student. It makes folks more competitive for postdocs, research-oriented internships or research jobs at bigger research institutions down the line. If I wanted to work at an academic hospital, it shows that I’ll be able to bring in grant funding.
But now I have this really sad line on my CV. I had to write several asterisks that the grant closed early, and I just have to hope that people who are reviewing my CV later know what that means—that the grant closed early, not because of my failure to complete the research, but because we have the infiltration of antiscientific thought in the federal government that forced a number of grants to close early.
It doesn’t stop at political science, psychology or even economics. It has legs and encroaches and creeps into biophysiological sciences and neuropsychology. It leaves no science safe.”
Q: How does your situation speak to any concerns you might have about the broader environment for science in this country right now?
A: We’re in this identity war moment, and it’s not based on anything but people’s own prejudice and bias and a sense of being victimized because they no longer have access to the power they used to. This is an attempt to recollect and to narrow who has that power, which has frightening implications across the board.
It doesn’t stop at political science, psychology or even economics. It has legs and encroaches and creeps into biophysiological sciences and neuropsychology. It leaves no science safe.
