Science and engineering students are hit as US revokes visas

A graduate student in chemical engineering at North Carolina State University is one of an uncertain but apparently growing number of international students in the US on visas that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has abruptly revoked.

The chemical engineer, one of two Saudi nationals attending NC State whose visas were revoked last month, left the country after learning of their change in immigration status, according to the Raleigh News and Observer. The chemical engineer has not been publicly identified.

The second Saudi student, Saleh Al Gurad, was pursuing a master’s degree in engineering management. He returned to Saudi Arabia on March 31, his former roommate, Philip Vasto, a chemical engineering undergraduate student, tells C&EN.

Vasto says that Al Gurad was notified that his visa had been canceled on March 27 through an email by the NC State Office of International Services. “My roommate came out of his room wide eyed and with just such a grave expression on his face, and he then told me that the school had informed him that his visa had been revoked,” Vasto says.

The notification came the same day that Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the press that the Trump administration had revoked more than 300 student and visitor visas. That number has continued to increase, though the total number of impacted students to date is unclear. Rubio said that many people who have recently had their visas revoked had participated in pro-Palestinian protests or had been involved in criminal activity; in several high-profile cases, ICE has arrested international graduate students for these reasons.

But, according to Vasto, neither reason applied to Al Gurad. He “did not participate in any activism whatsoever,” he says. Nor had he been in any legal trouble in the US, Vasto told Technician, the NC State student newspaper.

Al Gurad has declined to speak with C&EN and other media outlets. The NC State Office of International Services directed C&EN to a statement the office posted online on April 1. “NC State did not initiate these terminations and was not directly notified of these changes,” the university says in the statement.

In recent days, other universities across the country have reported similar revocations, and in many cases neither the school nor the student received direct notice from ICE. The US Department of State declined to comment on the number of students affected. A tracker compiled by Inside Higher Ed has documented that more than 400 students across at least 80 US institutions have had their visas revoked. The list of affected institutions includes Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Kentucky, and several University of California campuses. Universities have not revealed the affected students' identities because of privacy concerns, but several universities have stated that they are not aware of protests or other political activity by these students.

The uptick in visa revocations has inundated immigration lawyers’ inboxes. “Couple of days back I started hearing whispers from universities” that students’ legal status had been suspended without explanation or notification to the schools, Rajiv Khanna, a managing attorney at Immigration.com, said on an April 7 webinar. “Today it came to a complete meltdown. We got so many emails, LinkedIn messages, calls from people.”

In an April 3 webinar, Emily Neumann, a managing partner at the Houston firm Reddy Neumann Brown, said that although the revocation of visas for criminal infractions “is really nothing new,” the Department of Homeland Security seems to be “taking these revocations further,” and have begun including smaller infractions, such as traffic violations, as crimes worth a revocation.

A spokesperson for the State Department declined to comment on specific instances of student visas being revoked but told C&EN over email that the department revokes visas every day “to secure America's borders and keep our communities safe.” ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

Lawyers say that people whose visas are revoked are left with two choices. They can leave the country, as the two Saudi students from NC State did. Or they can engage a lawyer and sue, as have Cornell University student Momodou Taal—who later left the country—and Dartmouth College student Xiaotian Liu. Since the beginning of March, at least three more students have sued anonymously to restore their legal status, and Khanna says that a class-action suit is in the works. But some international students and researchers have learned of their change in visa status only after being detained by ICE officers, as was the case with Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk and Harvard University researcher Kseniia Petrova.

“We're living in a brand-new era, and it's a scary era,” Vasto says.