Some colleges could lose approval to enroll international students
Colleges that are too “pro-Hamas” could be blocked from enrolling international students, the Trump administration warns.
The threat to pull colleges’ federal student-visa authorization is another escalation of President Trump’s crackdown on both immigration and campus protest. And much like the abrupt revocation of the visas of international-student activists in recent days, the decertification plan could barrel past norms and safeguards, disregarding established rules and processes.
A senior State Department official told Axios that all colleges approved to enroll foreign students would be subject to a review. “You can have so many bad apples in one place that it leads to decertification of the school,” the official said. “I don’t think we’re at that point yet. But it is not an empty threat.”
Immigration arrests of students and scholars have multiplied, including a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University whose on-the-street detention by masked agents went viral. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week that some 300 visas of students and other visitors had been revoked on his order, citing little-used State Department authority to rescind visas for foreign-policy reasons.
“They’re visitors to the country. If they’re taking activities that are counter to our foreign — to our national interest, to our foreign policy, we’ll revoke the visa,” Rubio told reporters. “No one has a right to a visa.”
Rubio also sent a cable instructing American diplomats overseas to scrutinize the social-media accounts of some student-visa applicants as part of an effort to ban those critical of the United States and Israel from entering the country.
Now the administration could be upping the ante by seeking to penalize colleges. Although a presidential order previously directed colleges to “monitor” students and employees who take part in campus protests, going after the ability of institutions to admit international students could hit them where it hurts — tuition dollars from foreign students have become increasingly important to many colleges’ bottom lines. Columbia University, which has been singled out for its handling of protests over the war in Gaza, enrolls more than 20,000 international students, a larger number than all but two other institutions.
While the administration’s statement has unnerved colleges, it has baffled them, too. Decertifying a college, one longtime director of international-student services noted, is “cumbersome and rare.”
The infrastructure around student visas — and colleges’ administrative accountability — differs from that for other temporary, nonimmigrant visas. Since the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, colleges have had to register all international students in a federal database, the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or SEVIS, and are responsible for maintaining up-to-date information, such as student course loads and current addresses.
To enroll foreign students, institutions must be authorized by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Nearly 7,500 colleges, language programs, and secondary schools have such certification.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which oversees SEVIS, said 125 schools and colleges have “lost or voluntarily withdrawn” their certification during the current fiscal year. But experienced educators said it is relatively uncommon for the government to revoke such authority.
One administrator who handles student visas at her public university in the Midwest said she repeatedly alerted Homeland Security officials about a rash of students transferring out to a for-profit language school in New York despite being proficient in English. (The administrator asked not to be identified because of concerns about speaking publicly on a politically sensitive issue.) It took years before the school was shut down, she said.
As a reporter, I have first-hand experience with the decertification process, which includes appeals. In 2011, my colleagues and I wrote a lengthy investigative report about fraudulent colleges that act as visa mills, exploiting loopholes in the student-visa system to bring foreign workers to the United States.
Nearly all of the students were from overseas at one of the institutions we reported on, the University of Northern Virginia, and the address the college listed for its accreditor was an auto-body repair shop. Four months after our article published, immigration authorities raided the university, but it would be two and a half more years before it lost approval to enroll international students.
To Ronald B. Cushing, director of international services at the University of Cincinnati, the idea that the Trump administration could unilaterally yank colleges’ student-visa authority is a head-scratcher. “It’s an official process,” he said. “You don’t just wake up one day and find that you’re locked out of the SEVIS system.”
It’s unclear if the administration is drawing up plans to carry through on its threats. The ICE spokesperson said there were no requirements in current regulations for colleges to monitor the political and speech activities of student-visa holders and report them in the SEVIS system. Nor is the agency currently undertaking any actions to review institutions’ certifications based on campus protest, the spokesperson said.
The administration’s handling of student-visa revocations suggests that it may not be constrained by previous practice. The Midwestern administrator said she learned that several of her students’ records had been terminated only when she checked the visa database at the suggestion of a colleague at another college. Homeland Security officials typically notify colleges when it cancels their students’ visas. “This is not normal at all,” the administrator said.
