ICE Is Canceling Students’ Legal Status Without Informing Them or Their Schools: Report
The Trump administration is revoking students’ immigration status without notifying them or their schools, according to Zeteo.
Citing documents and interviews with university officials, Zeteo reported that “Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) appears to be manually revoking students’ immigration status — an authority typically left to university staff.”
Sometimes, ICE is not even informing the university or student that the status has been revoked, meaning students could be detained by immigration without any warning.
Students’ immigration status is tracked in a database called Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). In addition to having an immigration status, students also have student visas. Visas allow students to enter the U.S., while their status allows them to remain here as long as they are enrolled in courses, maintain the proper documentation, and abide by work restrictions. Just because a student’s visa is revoked does not necessarily mean they would lose their status.
As an anonymous source told Zeteo: “Someone at ICE pushed a button, and now [students] are ‘illegal’ through a process that absolutely should not be happening.”
ICE has arrested several university students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests, even though their free speech rights are protected by the First Amendment. ICE detained Palestinian activist and legal resident Mahmoud Khalil earlier this month. Khalil has been held in a Louisiana detention center while his attorneys ague he should be released, describing his arrest as a “Kafkaesque” attempt to subvert free speech.
ICE has also detained a Tufts University PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national, as well as a University of Minnesota graduate student. A video shows masked officers dressed in plainclothes approaching Ozturk and restraining her before showing her their badges.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that the administration has revoked “more than 300” foreign student visas. “We do it every day, every time I find one of these lunatics,” he said, referring to a detained student. As Zeteo pointed out, Rubio’s State Department is also reportedly using artificial intelligence to revoke student visas from those it designates as “pro-Hamas.”
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Ramya Krishnan, a senior staff attorney at Columbia University’s Knight Institute and lead attorney on a challenge to the administration’s deportation policy, told Rolling Stone, “Frankly, I don’t think we have seen the government do what it has done here before. This is unprecedented. The most obvious analogy would be to McCarthyism, but even during the McCarthy era, I don’t think you saw the government round up student and faculty protesters based on their political viewpoint, the way that you are seeing the government do here.”
The administration is justifying the arrests by claiming these students somehow pose a threat to foreign policy. But Krishnan and her team say that argument doesn’t hold up: “We think that the First Amendment forecloses the administration from relying on these provisions in this way, because it is engaging in blatant viewpoint discrimination by targeting only pro-Palestinian advocacy — and the First Amendment prohibits the state from engaging in viewpoint discrimination.”