Trump Is Trying to Deport Hundreds of Students for ‘Criminal Records’—Including a Domestic Violence Victim
“I wonder what else is to come. Are they going to be coming after naturalized citizens eventually?” said one student whose visa was revoked for unspecified reasons.
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One month ago, plain-clothes ICE agents confronted and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia graduate. The incident was quickly followed by the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish Fulbright scholar studying at Tufts University. Both were singled out for their criticisms of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza; Khalil for organizing peaceful anti-genocide protests at Columbia, while Ozturk was targeted by the Trump administration because she wrote an op-ed advocating for peace.
Since Khalil and Ozturk’s arrests, several more international students and academics with legal status have been detained by ICE, also because of their real or perceived advocacy for Palestinian human rights. Those arrests are, apparently, the deeply alarming tip of the iceberg. Zeteo News reports that hundreds more international students and academics have had their visas arbitrarily revoked with no reason given—many are being informed by university officials rather than the government.
Some of these students and their attorneys say they’ve received nebulous reasons from immigration authorities citing their “criminal records”—but the “criminal records” in question involve minor traffic violations that have since been expunged, parking tickets, and, in one student’s case, being the victim of domestic violence. One student had a misdemeanor DUI five years ago. The domestic violence victim was part of a dual arrest, a common situation in which both parties in an abusive situation are brought in to speak to cops. Now, the victim could be forced to leave the country.
Yet, for non-immigrants with legal status to have their status revoked for “criminal activity,” the threshold is much higher than a DUI or being brought into a police station. Under federal law, someone must be convicted “for a crime of violence for which a sentence of more than one-year imprisonment may be imposed constitutes a failure to maintain status.”
The State Department has justified its targeting of pro-Palestine legal residents in academia by claiming they hold “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” But in many of the cases reviewed by Zeteo, students aren’t even being told what they did to justify having their visas revoked. One immigration attorney representing several students told the outlet that the entire process “really feels AI or computer-driven, like someone wrote a program, like, if A, then B” to identify any international student with any “criminal” record, without even reviewing what that record is before revoking their visa. “It doesn’t feel like there’s a human element to this.”