President Donald Trump’s move to terminate the legal immigration status of hundreds of international students is leaving Illinois educators scrambling to find ways to help.
“The bar keeps moving, as far as who’s at risk,” said Alyson Kung, an assistant director at the University of Illinois Chicago’s Asian American Resource and Cultural Center.
In many cases, federal officials are erasing students’ immigration status without notifying school officials. The students are not being told why the terminations happened.
“I think I’ve been transparent with the U.S. government,” said a recent University of Illinois Chicago master’s degree student whose visa was revoked. “I’d like the same transparency when I’m getting kicked out.”
The student asked to remain anonymous so as not to jeopardize future attempts to reapply for legal immigration status. On April 3, he received an email from the State Department informing him only that “[a]dditional information became available after your visa was issued.”
In the email, federal officials did not offer the student the opportunity to respond or appeal the termination. The notice said that remaining in the United States could result in fines, detention and deportation. The email also threatened that the student could be sent to a country other than his native India.
“Please note that deportation can take place at a time that does not allow the person being deported to secure possessions or conclude affairs in the United States,” the email notes. “Persons being deported may be sent to countries other than their countries of origin.”
More than 800 students across the country have received similar notifications, according to an April 11 legal brief filed by 19 Democratic attorneys general, including Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul. The state officials asked a federal judge to block the cancellations.
Visa cancellations are happening at campuses across Illinois, upending the lives of students, leaving faculty and staff unsure how to offer guidance and threatening the financial health of the schools themselves. International students at the University of Illinois Chicago, Illinois State University, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University and Northern Illinois University have been affected.
On Tuesday, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker blasted the visa revocations, saying they are part of the Trump administration’s attack on higher education. He said the federal government was “going after students who are here with legal visas — visas that were granted by the federal government themselves, who are studying here, who’ve done nothing wrong.”
International students in Georgia, California and other states are suing Trump officials over the terminations, saying the actions are not legally justified and do not offer students a way to challenge the decisions.
“I‘ve seen a lot more students this semester in my office crying and just trying to figure out how they’re going to deal with things than I have in a while,” Kung said.
Nearly 8% of UIC’s 33,000-plus students are international, according to data from the school.
Kung’s students are trying to balance classes and jobs while coping with Trump’s widening threats to foreign-born students and their family members: First, mass ICE raids targeted immigrants without legal status; then federal agents detained international students who had spoken or written in support of the Palestinian people, like Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University.
Now, students are faced with the threat of the seemingly indiscriminate termination of hundreds of international students’ visas and their legal immigration status.
“We do the best we can … [but] my understanding of how things are supposed to work doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s how it’s going to happen,” Kung said of trying to help students.
Sarah Spreitzer, vice president of the American Council on Education, said the lack of transparency about the immigration changes — including information as basic as what is triggering the terminations — is causing panic for students and universities.
“If I had an international student come to me and say, ‘I’m really confused by this message, please help me. What does this mean for my education? Do I need to leave now?’ — How is an institution supposed to advise that student?” Spreitzer asked.
Consequences for students and universities
More than 60,000 international students are enrolled at colleges across Illinois, according to the Association of International Educators. Kung and other educators say they are an essential part of their campus communities. They expose local students to vastly different lived experiences and perspectives, and they pay higher tuition rates that shore up university revenue.
Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, said international doctorate students are crucial to conducting and advancing research.
“It will be difficult to attract students to the U.S., given the stories that are already out there of people being denied entry or even just arrested off the streets,” Kelchen said. “This has effects at the undergraduate level, but much larger effects at the graduate level, where a sizable share of students are international.”
Spreitzer said the visa terminations could give an edge to other countries that compete with the U.S. for international students.
“In order to study here, foreign-born students have to demonstrate they have enough money to pay for tuition and living expenses without working,” she said. “[If] you feel that perhaps your status could change in the middle of your education and you could lose your student visa, are you going to make that huge financial commitment and investment in coming to the United States? Or are you rather going to go to Australia or the U.K., where you feel that there’s more certainty around your status and that you’ll be able to finish your degree?”
The UIC student who spoke to WBEZ about his visa termination is planning to apply to doctorate programs in Europe.
While his attorneys called the cancellation of his immigration status unprecedented and challenged its legality, the student said they still advised that he leave the country.
“If ICE detains us, they cannot do anything about it,” the student said. “That’s exactly one of the immigration attorney’s words.”
The student flew to his home country on April 13.
“I had a lot of things planned,” the student said. “I had a lot of future trips with friends, personal goals, and I’ll have to pivot all of that. But the thing is, I cannot stop living my life.”
Lisa Kurian Philip covers higher education for WBEZ, in partnership with Open Campus. Follow her on Twitter @LAPhilip.