How Trump is wrecking international students' lives & careers

By Anonymous, an Indian origin professor at a US university

Sustained tracking of international students in US universities began over two decades ago. SEVIS or the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System was introduced in 2003 by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to maintain information on international students and exchange visitors following 9/11.

Demographic and curricular diversity have steadily become suspect because immigrants, students and temporary workers are seen as potentially threatening. They all have a home in universities across the US and they are all being targeted under the second Trump administration.

How is SEVIS being weaponized against international students?

Unsurprisingly, soon after diversity initiatives were abolished from many public institutions in Republican controlled states, the administration went after international students, getting their information through SEVIS records. There were obvious patterns.

Minor infractions or run-ins with the law including driving tickets and altercations brought some foreign students on the ICE radar.

Participation in demonstrations and protests if documented on social media also yielded information about the most politically active.

Another pattern was targeting students and scholars based on their research agendas or specific nationalities.

This writer has witnessed hostile interrogation by US immigration officers over the past two months and fielded questions about the nature of their own research in April. Sciences are immediately suspect. Social Sciences a little less. Humanities not so much. Because of course those who just read and write cannot cause too much harm.

Thanks to these tactics, students, teachers and researchers on F1, J1, H1 and other visas are afraid to travel outside the US, fearful of not being allowed back. While some are staying put, others choose to self-deport rather than live in fear of being asked to leave.

Once informed over email that their SEVIS record has been terminated, the individuals informed must self-deport using the CPB One app or risk being denied a visa in the future. One assessment on guidelines for self-deportation is that they are simply a threat and intimidation tactic, which can be blocked by the courts, as has been the case over the past few weeks.

Reports say ICE is reinstating student records and halting deportations for now. But who’s willing to risk being shackled for 24 hours or more as hundred Indian deportees were during the long flights home in February-March? Or worse, risk detention in an immigration center?

Among recent cases are those of Columbia doctoral student Ranjani Srinivasan who fled across the border to Canada when ICE came knocking and Georgetown postdoctoral scholar Badar Khan Suri who remains in detention. This despite US district judge Patricia Tolliver Giles ruling in Viriginia that Suri cannot be removed from the United States until a contrary order is issued by the court.

What’s the role played by the International Office across US universities?

Indians are the biggest group of international students in the United States, with over 331,000 enrolled in colleges and universities in 2023-2024. Often the first stop of these students upon arriving on campus is the International Office (IO), a hub in all large and small American universities seeking global enrollment.

As an international student in the early 2000s, now faculty at a large public university, this writer has experienced how IOs foster global culture, education and research in visible and invisible ways.

IOs process foreign student, post-doctoral and faculty paperwork for visas, issue SEVIS documents, administer many US State Department collaborations and funding programs and ensure that those on campus from different parts of the world feel welcome. They support student organizations, among them Indian and South Asian Student Associations, whose events attract audiences from the university and the community. Thanks to IOs, Holi, Diwali, and Eid are yearly campus celebrations.

Students, faculty and post-doctoral scholars count on IOs to lessen their sense of loneliness and isolation. The friendships forged here make the long process of acquiring a university degree quite a bit more bearable.

The bonds often last a lifetime, becoming a network of connections that alumni can access several years after they have graduated. IOs make US universities look outward, even when they are in back of the beyond towns and cities.

IOs are also often the first stop of ICE officials when they arrive on campuses to enforce deportations. Recent years notwithstanding, such intimidation and enforcement are not substantially different than those in previous decades of the 20th and 21st centuries. Students have always spoken out against national and international injustice and been repeatedly targeted.

From the black and white students’ lunch counter desegregation efforts to the freedom riders, to efforts to register voters in the South, to remedial education and free breakfast programs for children, students are historically at the forefront of social change.

Under orders of the likes of Jim Clark, Bull Connor, Laurie Pritchett and other police chiefs in the 1950s and 1960s students were attacked, imprisoned, tortured, and murdered when they challenged Jim Crow.

Though not always in forefront, Asian, African, Caribbean, and Latin American students were active in and central to the Black Freedom, Free Speech and anti-Vietnam War movements.

In the 1980s US and international students worked together to make apartheid an issue when many countries except the US had already imposed sanctions against the brutally exploitative racist South African regime.

250 boxes of archival materials in the writer’s university document this history of student resistance. Deportations are the most recent form of tear gas, water hoses, batons and tasers used to dispel past and present student protests.

In The University in Ruins (1996), scholar Bill Readings, who studied and taught in England, the US and Canada, farsightedly proposed getting rid of the idea that the integrity of the modern university is linked to the nation-state and the promotion and protection of the idea of a national culture.

The “Americanization” of the university, he said, means this is no longer the case. For Readings, “Americanization” was the imposition of an imaginary “cash-nexus” in place of the notion of a national identity. The idea of the cash nexus drives Trump and his capitalist goons.

Witness their threats to cut financial aid to universities or take away their tax-exempt status. No-tuition or low tuition paying graduate students, lowly paid postdocs, and foundation funded research scholars are among the first to be weeded out under false pretexts of terrorist affiliations, research protocol violations, or un-American activities of protest. All Americans should be afraid for all students, their own and foreign.

How is the Fulbright idea being torn apart?

Senator William Fulbright, architect of US educational internationalism, initiator of the Fulbright program active in over 150 countries around the world, once said that the “essence of intercultural education is the acquisition of empathy – the ability to see the world as others see it, and to allow for the possibility that others may see something we have failed to see, or may see it more accurately.”

A Southern Democrat with a chequered racial and educational record, Senator Fulbright overcame some of his own early prejudices to support the anti-war and voting rights efforts student activists had already championed.

Contrary to this august legacy, Trump and his minions hope to make US institutions monocultural, monoracial and mononational. Universities are bullied into offering little or no economic support to racial minorities, working-class and first-generation learners. Universities are being turned into institutions where people will not or dare not voice differences of opinions. And universities are being rid of non-US students by self-deportations, forcible removals or detentions.

Blinded by power, the Trump administration scores short-term political brownie points while penalizing international, intercultural researchers who butter the bread of US universities with their underpaid and undervalued academic labor. To dissolve the plurality of ideas, people, and voices these students bring can only lead to uninformed agreement out of touch with the global reality.

Foreign students and researchers will go to universities elsewhere in the world where they are valued and respected. US colleges and universities may never recover!