Thousands of visas have probably been revoked by the State Department since President Donald Trump took office, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said during a Senate subcommittee hearing on Tuesday.
“I don’t know the latest count, but we probably have more to do,” the former Senator said. “We’re going to continue to revoke the visas of people who are here as guests and are disrupting our higher education facilities.”
The estimate marks a significant increase from late March, when Rubio said student visa cancellations stood at 300.
“A visa is not a right, it’s a privilege,” he said on Tuesday.
The Trump Administration has moved to cancel student visas as part of its broader efforts to crack down on immigration. Foreign-born students who have expressed pro-Palestinian views have in particular been targeted after protesters staged hundreds of encampments across numerous colleges and universities in an effort to pressure their schools to divest from Israel and voice their dismay at the U.S.’s strong support of the country throughout the ongoing war in Gaza.
At least one student, Tufts University’s Rumeysa Ozturk, was arrested by ICE earlier this year after she wrote an op-ed about her university’s failure to acknowledge Senate resolutions regarding the Gaza conflict.
Ozturk has since been released from custody. Another detained student, Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil, a lead organizer of the college encampments, is still being held at a detention center in Louisiana, where he has been for the past nine weeks.
The Administration sought to revoke the immigration status of thousands of international students in April. But it walked back the efforts—said to affect some 4,700 international students—later in the month following an onslaught of legal challenges and protests, with the Department of Justice announcing that students’ immigration records would be reinstated.
Tensions between the Trump Administration and higher education institutions remain fraught as federal officials attempt to pressure universities such as Harvard to comply with Administration demands—including the elimination of all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs—or face the cancellation of federal funding.
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