International Students Fear Traveling Abroad Due to Trump’s Policies

After reports of student arrests and detainments, an international student at Nashville, Tennessee’s Belmont University, canceled his flight home to India. A thousand miles away in Boston, a foreign medical resident called off his trip to Jordan, fearing that immigration officials would not allow him to reenter the U.S.

For safety reasons, the student and medical resident are not disclosing their names. However, through their stories, they hope the public better understands the fear and uncertainty young people on foreign visas are experiencing in the wake of President Donald Trump’s unprecedented attacks on international students and college activists.

In recent months, plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have grabbed students, all of them green card and visa holders, targeted for their pro-Palestinian activism and vocal criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In one highly publicized case, ICE detained Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, placing him in deportation proceedings and forcing him to miss the birth of his first child.

Separately, the Trump administration revoked and later restored the legal status of more than 4,700 international students. More recently, the government tried to stop Harvard University from enrolling international students.

The government’s unparalleled actions toward international students have created an environment of fear, with many now avoiding summer travel to see their families.

International students “right now are in a state of stress and anxiety like never before,” the Belmont student said. “No one is providing any reasoning for what’s going on.”

Faulty Logic

The U.S. government uses a database called the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) to track foreign students. If a student’s SEVIS status is terminated, they no longer have legal status in the U.S. and are at risk of detention and deportation.

During an April hearing about SEVIS revocations, officials with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) explained that as part of its “Student Criminal Alien Initiative,” the agency terminated the legal status of 3,000 international students for alleged criminal records found in the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), a computerized index overseen by the FBI that includes criminal history information. But advocates and attorneys told Prism that many students whose legal statuses were terminated were never charged or convicted of a crime.

“NCIC is a very broad database,” said Molly Linhorst, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of New Jersey. “It includes pretty much anyone who has had any contact with the criminal legal system.” The attorney explained that the database could include people with traffic violations, people who were dismissed of charges, and people who are deemed missing.

New York-based immigration attorney Minwon Cho, who is preparing a lawsuit on behalf of students whose SEVIS records were terminated, said one of his clients was not charged in a case, but rather served as a witness.

The Belmont student said news of the SEVIS terminations heightened his fears around travel because of a previous speeding ticket. He consulted a lawyer, who advised him not to travel home to India.

“I decided that it’s not worth the risk,” he said.

The medical resident was deeply concerned about being unable to return to the U.S. from Jordan after three residents from his medical program got stuck abroad with their visas pending. If he faced a similar situation and missed time in his residency, it would have serious ramifications for his career. He would have to repeat a year or face expulsion from his program.

“Imagine having to do residency for three years just to have it all get thrown away,” he said.

“This Is Racial Discrimination”

Ola Galal, a clinical assistant professor of global cultures at New York University (NYU), said that since Khalil’s arrest and the SEVIS terminations, students of color have approached her with concerns about traveling abroad and returning to the U.S. None of these students were involved in student activism, indicating to her that “concern is spreading even wider among international students, not only those who are active in campus protests.”

Cho said that in all the SEVIS terminations he’s encountered, the students were from Asian or African countries. “So I’m thinking, what kind of filtering system did you use as a government?” Cho said. “This is racial discrimination.”

The Rutgers University students represented by the ACLU of New Jersey are from China and India, according to Linhorst, which leads her to question whether there is an “equal protection issue” at play. However, she also noted that the number of students targeted from China and India could be higher because the majority of international students are from countries in Asia.

Kaiser Aslam, a Muslim chaplain at Rutgers University, said that at least a dozen students reached out to him about changing their travel plans. The atmosphere created by the Trump administration has made international students feel like “second-class citizens,” Aslam said. “They feel limited in their travel opportunities, how much they can participate in public life.” He added that since the arrests of students protesting the war in Gaza, he’s seen lower attendance of international students at Muslim Student Association events.

The SEVIS terminations don’t appear to be linked to students who were politically active or vocal about their criticism of the Trump administration. But the Trump administration has made clear that it is targeting foreign students who participated in pro-Palestine protests. One January executive order read: “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you.”

Forced to “Remain Silent”

Trump’s targeting of international students has also led many to fear exercising their freedom of speech. The Belmont student said he used to frequently post Instagram stories about the atrocities Israel is committing in Gaza, but he stopped when Trump re-entered the White House. “I’ve been forced to remain silent,” he said. “I just decided to make a conscious decision to not risk my visa status.”

In March, officials from the State Department told Axios of their plan to use artificial intelligence to surveil foreign students’ social media accounts and revoke the visas of pro-Palestine students — support the officials conflated with support for Hamas.

Nathan Wessler, a deputy director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, said that in recent months, there has been an increase in the number of people reaching out to the organization with concerns about traveling abroad. Wessler said that because of the government’s surveillance technology, it’s unclear how effective it might be to delete social media prior to crossing international borders.

People can take some precautions when traveling, such as using a burner phone that does not contain personal data, having a strong password, and turning off Touch ID and Face ID.

“Nobody should have to feel like they have to scrub their social media presence of criticism of the U.S. government or political speech in order to be safe at the border,” Wessler said. “But this administration is making people have to rethink that, which is extremely chilling, and it’s not what is supposed to be allowed under the First Amendment.”

Cho has told his international student clients not to leave the country until Donald Trump’s presidency is over.

“They spend all of their resources and energy to come to the United States. After they have done everything, they are worried whether they can even complete their degree or not,” Cho said. “Why would you risk that?”

Students Rethinking Activism

In her letter notifying Harvard that she revoked its ability to enroll foreign students, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem demanded that the school provide all existing video and audio footage of foreign students participating in protest activity.

Galal of NYU said that these kinds of government crackdowns on free speech have led some students to reconsider their role in activism.

“Instead of being in the front lines, they would take a role that is behind the scenes, to be able to still support the movement, but not necessarily be as visible as they would have liked to be,” Galal explained.

Other foreign students remain undeterred by the government’s efforts to chill free speech. Archit Mehta, a recent graduate student on an F-1 visa from Georgetown University, was advised by his school to be more cautious after his colleague, Badar Khan Suri, was detained by ICE and placed in deportation proceedings. Suri was recently released after being detained for two months in ICE facilities across three states.

An attorney told Mehta not to post political content on social media or attend protests. But he has continued these actions to “resist” the government’s attempts to scare students from condemning the genocide.

“I had some experience working in India as a journalist, so I understand that a lot of it can just be optics,” said Mehta, who donned a Palestinian flag during his university’s commencement ceremony last month. “The idea is not to succumb to self-censorship when a totalitarian regime acts this way.”

Editorial Team:
Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor