Some international students at universities across Michigan were blindsided in recent days to discover that their student visas were revoked without warning.
The students were given no information that their immigration status was in peril, according to attorneys familiar with the cases of multiple students who have found themselves in this situation. Most were reportedly informed by their universities, rather than by immigration officials.
Ruby Robinson, an attorney with the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, called the situation unprecedented. He said that in the past, international students in the U.S. on student visas have had their visas revoked due to run-ins with the law or other defined offenses, but that was “rare.”
Now, Robinson said students are finding themselves with their “visa being revoked and status terminated. There are very limited circumstances in which the status of an individual can be terminated, and from what I have seen so far in my conversations, I don't think any of them meet the requirements to have their status terminated. And what it means when your status is terminated is that you are undocumented and deportable in the United States.”
“All of this is happening in an environment in which there is no due process and no fairness,” Robinson added. “There are limited opportunities to try to challenge these actions.”
Robinson said that among the international students he’s spoken to, the only common thread he can find is that some had minor run-ins with law enforcement in the past. In one case, he said, a student was involved in a domestic abuse incident where police were called, but no charges were ever filed.
ACLU of Michigan attorney Ramis Wadood has also spoken with multiple international students facing loss of legal status in the U.S., and said there seemed to be no clear explanation of who has been targeted.
“And that's kind of the point, it seems, is that the Trump Administration is trying to sow chaos and fear by casting a wide net and targeting students from multiple national origins in multiple schools, multiple programs,” Wadood said. “The net is cast so wide that it's hard to really see whether or not there is any targeting, or if the Trump administration is just going after as many students as it can.”
Neither the Trump administration nor U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has so far offered information about or rationale for the student visa revocations in Michigan, and the agency did not immediately respond an inquiry from Michigan Public.
The situation has been reported at universities across the country, and last week Secretary of State Marco Rubio painted a broad picture of who might lose their student visas under Trump administration policy: "If they’re taking activities that are counter to our foreign — to our national interest, to our foreign policy, we’ll revoke the visa," Rubio said.
Ruby Robinson said he expects the actions to continue and to escalate. “It's very concerning for the students, for campus communities, and it poses very real concerns about due process, academic freedom, [and] democracy.
“The clients who I've spoken to are stressed. They're anxious. They're not sleeping. They're worried about the time and monetary investment that they have made in themselves and in these universities over the past however many years they've been in school in the United States. They are really worried about what this means for them, but also university and college communities across the country," Robinson said.
"Universities and colleges in the United States have long been beacons of freedom and democracy, and today they don't appear to be," he added.
