After a dizzying few weeks of visa revocations and reinstatements, the Maroon spoke to UChicago international students who were reevaluating their decisions to study in the United States. All of the students were granted anonymity due to fear of government retaliation.
“The reason that any of us travel to a different country, leave everything behind, is so that we can access better education, better opportunities,” an undergraduate student from India said in an interview.
“This stuff scares me so much,” she continued. “If I get deported, I’m just not going to be intellectually stimulated back home. There are great institutions, but none of them are on par with what UChicago has to offer.”
Last month, the Department of State revoked the visas of 10 UChicago students and recent alumni as part of a broad program of visa terminations. In a major reversal a few weeks later, all ten visas were reinstated, along with those of thousands of other students.
The reversal of the visa revocations was a short-lived win for students who had filed lawsuits in federal court accusing the government of acting without due process. On April 30, the government announced new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) policies that expand the range of justifications for canceling a student’s legal status in the U.S.
For the student from India, the fear of deportation has added more stress to the challenge of navigating college in a foreign country. “It’s already difficult to reconcile your identity at home and your identity here. The way that you talk, the way that you dress, a lot of things are just very fundamentally different here than the way they are back home.”
She said that she had been prepared to minimize her social media footprint and avoid criticizing the U.S. government as a foreign national in the U.S., but Trump’s crackdown on immigration has led to a new level of fear and uncertainty.
She had previously come to the U.S. in 2019 for a two-week summer program. Then, she recalled, her parents and teachers cautioned her: “‘Don’t leave a trail on social media of you supporting one thing or the other, because all of it can be accessed and all of it can be used against you.’”
However, those warnings did not feel immediate to her until the last few months, she said.
“One of the things that I wrote about in my UChicago essay is that this is the one school across the country that promotes speaking for what you believe in, and I don’t feel comfortable doing that,” she said.
Since taking office, Trump has embarked on what he has referred to as a campaign “to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence,” targeting international students who participated in pro-Palestine activism during the wave of protests that swept across U.S. college campuses last spring.
Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia University who led negotiations during its encampment, was arrested in March by immigration enforcement on the grounds that his continued presence in the country could have “serious adverse foreign policy consequences” for the U.S., despite not being accused of or charged with a crime. Khalil has since filed a lawsuit against the government, arguing that he was wrongfully detained and denied due process.
Trump’s State Department has also revoked student visas for minor infractions unrelated to protest activity. In one case, a Brigham Young University Ph.D. student from Japan had his visa revoked for harvesting more fish than his fishing license allowed in 2019.
An undergraduate international student from China said she first grew worried after reading about a case of a Chinese student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who had her visa revoked due to a speeding violation.
“I cannot see how getting a speeding ticket makes you a danger to national security,” she said.
She felt that the government had used the goal of “combating antisemitism to target Chinese students.”
“To be honest, we are model international students. We don’t go into the encampment because we are already told, ‘don’t get into trouble,’” she said.
The U.S.’s historically fraught relationship with China has led previous administrations to place Chinese students under more scrutiny than foreign nationals from allied countries due to national security concerns. The student from China explained that, while she sees that scrutiny as justified, the recent visa revocations felt “arbitrary” in many cases.
The legal power the Trump administration wields, combined with the wide array of reasons for which students have had their visas revoked, has led her to feel “helpless.”
“What Trump is doing is hawkish and extreme, but still within the bounds of legality,” she said.
“There’s not really any legal protection for us.”
Leaving Campus Six Weeks Before Graduation
Last month, a UChicago student in the last year of his master’s program at the Harris School returned home to Saudi Arabia on his government’s advice after his visa was revoked. Misho Ceko, the senior associate dean of business operations at Harris, confirmed the information in an interview with the Maroon.
The student’s legal status was restored along with the nine other UChicago students and alumni whose visas were revoked, but “he did not feel comfortable staying here,” Ceko said. The Maroon was not immediately able to reach the student for comment about the details of the revocation.
The Harris Office of Academic & Student Affairs has been working with the student to ensure he receives his degree, according to Ceko, who called the student’s return home “a tragedy.”
“He’s going to miss out on the last six weeks, which are really special. You are saying goodbye to many of your friends and walking across the stage,” Ceko said.
A Possible Decline in International Student Enrollment
Student concerns indicate that Trump’s crackdown on immigration could have long-term effects on the higher education landscape by affecting the number of international students who choose to study in the U.S. International students currently comprise 13 percent of students in the College and 24 percent of the University community.
“For incoming students, there is a lot of concern about coming and studying in the U.S. Their countries and their governments are telling them to be careful, there are advisory warnings,” Ceko said.
Professors and administrators have warned of “brain drain,” the phenomenon of slowing innovation and research production due to lost talent, if international students opt to leave the country or not to study here in the first place.
International students “contributed $43.8 billion to the U.S. economy during the 2023-2024 academic year and supported more than 378,000 jobs,” according to an analysis by NAFSA, an association of international educators.
A graduate student from the European Union (EU) told the Maroon that her friends who had once hoped to stay in the country and apply for more permanent visas after receiving their degrees now plan to leave as soon as they graduate.
She also plans to return home in a few months after she graduates, amid growing anxiety about her participation in campus activism over the last year. “I’ve deleted my social media. I only kept WhatsApp,” she said. “I’ve just had enough.”
In addition to the international students already studying at U.S. institutions, those who had planned to come to the U.S. are rethinking their plans.
An undergraduate international student from Egypt said two of his friends from Lebanon and Egypt have turned down offers to study at UChicago and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively. They have instead chosen to apply to institutions in the United Kingdom and the EU, such as the London School of Economics.
“I was talking to one of them, and he said he wasn’t sure whether they would actually have a safe environment to learn or would wake up one morning and see that their visa is revoked and they’re getting deported,” he said. He added that neither of them had been involved in pro-Palestine causes.
“If international students do not show up at American universities, it will be catastrophic for higher education. It will turn everything upside down,” Ceko said. “We haven’t seen an impact yet, but that doesn’t mean [international students] are going to show up in the fall.”
