Trump's Unlawful Campaign to Revoke Visas of International Students for Minor Offenses Is Designed to Spread Fear

Apr 22, 2025

As part of its assault on Harvard, the Trump administration has threatened to revoke the university's ability to sponsor international students, using the Department of Homeland Security’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program as a political weapon in the same way it is now trying to use the IRS.

But this is just part of a broader attack on international students, whose visas and legal status are being revoked arbitrarily and illegally, for offenses literally as small as a traffic violation.

CNN reports on lawsuits challenging this:

By CNN’s tally, more than 1,000 students and graduates have had their visas or statuses revoked, undermining their ability to remain in the US and continue their studies. Cases have ranged from high-profile instances involving alleged support of terror organizations to relatively minor offenses, like years-old misdemeanors.
While some affected students have brought individual cases, at least two federal lawsuits filed in courts in Georgia and New Hampshire aim to represent large swaths of students at once—more than a hundred in each. …
The lawsuit acknowledges some of the plaintiffs have faced criminal allegations or charges, but none have a criminal conviction. None have violated the restriction that requires them not to be convicted of a violent crime carrying a sentence longer than one year, the lawsuit says. … “DHS’s act of unlawfully terminating SEVIS records appears to be designed to coerce students, including each Plaintiff, into abandoning their studies and ‘self-deporting’ despite not violating their status.”

The kicker in this story is that the students “are identified using pseudonyms ‘due to fear of retaliation by Defendants,’” that is, retaliation from the government. Many foreign students bring their talents to America precisely because we offer the protection of the rule of law—a protection they can no longer be taken for granted.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.