US Revokes Visas: Deports Hundreds of Students and Teachers

CNN reviewed court documents, attorney statements, and announcements from dozens of universities and colleges across the country. The network confirmed that more than 340 students, teachers, and researchers have had their visas revoked this year. Visas can be revoked for even minor offenses committed in the past.

Photo: Alexugalek | Dreamstime.com

Ksenia Petrova's journey from Harvard lab to immigration detention began with frogs. A Russian woman working at Harvard Medical School failed to declare "benign" frog embryos she was carrying on her return to the U.S. from France in February, her lawyer said. Instead of being fined, Petrova's visa was revoked and she was taken into custody (we wrote about this story).

It was "a punishment completely out of proportion to the situation" for Petrova, said her lawyer Greg Romanowski, calling the error on the customs form "unintentional."
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) explained: "Messages found on Petrova's phone showed that she planned to smuggle materials through customs without declaring them."

On the subject: Dissenting Immigrant Students Arrested and Jailed in Louisiana

Petrova is now being held at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Louisiana pending a June 9 court hearing that could result in her return to Russia, where Petrova’s lawyer says she will be immediately arrested because of her past condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last month that the State Department had revoked more than 300 visas, most of them student visas.

Visas are cancelled due to minor offenses

The first high-profile cases involved those accused of supporting terrorist organizations, such as the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil after pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University.

Immigration lawyers say more and more threats to deport students now involve visa revocations for relatively minor offenses, such as misdemeanors committed years ago, or sometimes for no reason at all.

“All of these tools that exist in immigration law have been used before, but they are used in a way that is designed to create mass hysteria, chaos, and panic in the hopes that students will not get the legal help they need and will get tired of fighting and just leave the country,” said Jeff Joseph, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Hundreds of people associated with the colleges face possible deportation.

Revoking student visas for various reasons is not uncommon, Minneapolis immigration attorney David Wilson told CNN. But forcing people already in the US to leave the country immediately is another matter entirely, especially in the middle of a semester.

"A visa is like a car key," Wilson said. "You can take it away in advance. But it's quite another thing to stop a car in the middle of the street and tell a person to get out."

That difference is at the heart of a lawsuit filed April 7 by a Dartmouth graduate student of Chinese descent. Xiaotian Liu, a computer science major who has been studying in the United States since 2016, is asking the court to issue a temporary restraining order to prevent the government from expelling him from the country.
His F-1 student visa was revoked. Liu's lawyers argue that this does not give Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) the right to immediately force him to leave the United States, especially since he was given no explanation.

“Liu has not committed any crime, not even a traffic violation,” his lawyers said in a court document. “He has not shown any aggression and has not even participated in protests in the United States or anywhere else.”

Immigration arrests often happen without warning, attorneys say.

University of Minnesota graduate student Dogukan Gunaydin was detained by ICE on March 27 because of a previous drunk driving conviction, a senior Department of Homeland Security official told CNN.

Wilson, who is not involved in Gunaydin's case, said drunk driving is grounds for visa revocation, but he has never seen it used to remove someone from the country.
While the Department of Homeland Security publicly touts its efforts to deport students and teachers, the visa revocation process falls under the jurisdiction of the State Department, which has been more muted in its comments.

According to a government report, more than 1,5 million people were in the U.S. on student visas issued by the Department of Homeland Security in 2023, while the State Department says the exchange program “provides opportunities for approximately 300 foreign visitors from 000 countries and territories annually.”

Courts are the last hope

In Khalil’s case, it was only after the lawsuit was filed that the government pointed out that he had failed to disclose his previous employment at the British embassy in Beirut and that he had been an unpaid intern at the UN agency for Palestinian refugees in the Near East. By the time Khalil’s case came to trial, he had already been transferred to a detention facility in Louisiana, 1,500 miles from home.

Students and their families aren’t the only ones left in the dark. Several institutions, including the University of Texas at Austin, Stanford University, and the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), said they were never directly notified by the government that they had students whose visas had been revoked. In many cases, schools learned of the decision only after checking government databases and discovering that permission had been revoked without a specific explanation.

“The termination notices indicate that all cases involve violations of the terms of these individuals’ visa programs,” UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk said in a statement to students and faculty on Sunday, April 6.

The lack of clarity about what is causing some scholars to lose their right to study and work in the United States is causing concern in the international student community.

Some students are receiving notices of loss of legal status, often accompanied by an offer to “self-deport” rather than fight the deportation in court and risk detention. The CBP One app, which Customs and Border Protection used during the Biden administration to schedule the arrival of asylum seekers, was changed to CBP Home last month to allow people to notify the government that they will voluntarily leave the U.S.

The threat of forced removal from the United States always comes with a financial cost. The Department of Homeland Security has said on social media that it could fine an immigrant $998 per day for remaining in the country after receiving a “final order of removal.”

You may be interested in: top New York news, stories of our immigrants and helpful tips about life in the Big Apple - read it all on ForumDaily New York

As immigration cases slowly move through the courts, the speed and unpredictability of deportation actions against immigrants who were in the country legally has left many of Wilson's clients uneasy.

“I have people who naturalized 10 years ago asking if they can travel if they have a parking ticket,” he said. “People are scared because of the uncertainty. They are afraid that the slightest contact with law enforcement will cause consequences that will ruin their lives in the United States.”

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