Accompanying the revocations was an announcement that the Trump Administration introduced new social media screenings for antisemitic activity by students seeking visas and those already in American universities.
UT Dallas sophomore Alexander Lawless, a business major who enjoys photography, was doing a photo shoot outside with his friend Wadi, a UT Dallas senior who came from Saudi Arabia to study computer information systems. As Lawless and Wadi were in the middle of their shoot, they started to receive a flurry of messages as news broke across campus that 19 international students had their visas revoked.
“The moment he [Wadi] pulled out his phone and saw the coverage our school paper had put out, I saw a visceral ‘oh shit’ reaction hit him,” Lawless said. “I saw his heart just fully drop. That is the first time I had ever seen him feel actual fear.”
The Observer contacted Wadi to confirm his identity and ask for comment. Wadi requested we use a pseudonym out of concern for his student visa status.
Lawless said that once Wadi had the news about the visa revocations and the knowledge that the Department of Homeland Security was going to be monitoring social media accounts for alleged antisemitism without a clear indication of what would and would not be classified as antisemitic, his first reaction was to scrub everything from his personal accounts that could at all be associated with his Muslim faith just to be safe and avoid the possibility of deportation.
“I watched him lobotomize his entire online identity out of the genuine fucking fear that the federal government would use it to strip him of his education,” Lawless said “It was horrible to see one of my closest friends feel that he was under so much threat because he just so happens to be Muslim under the current administration.”
Recent Student Troubles
Despite Wadi not having been public about his politics, he still feels that anything could happen in the wake of other student deportations and detainments. Attacks against international students have become increasingly common under the current presidential administration. The public detainment of Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk were some of the first in the current volley of attacks against international students and their ability to attend the schools they're enrolled in.Khalil and Ozturk were both targeted for their speech, but the Texas revocations have been shadowed in uncertainty and speculation. The names of the students affected are unknown, nor are the reasons they had their immigration status changed. For the most part, North Texas university administrators have so far only said that the situation is fluid and that they have reached out to affected students. Such vague statements have done little to assure students like Wadi.
A spokesperson for UTD told the Observer, “It is our understanding that 19 enrolled students have had their immigration status terminated. This is a fluid situation, and we are communicating with affected students about the changes in their status as soon as possible.”
UTD has sent out no other communications to its students regarding the visa revocations, but UTD President Richard Benson did make sure to ask students to donate money to the annual university-wide fundraiser — Comet’s Giving Day. In contrast to UTD’s response, UT Arlington’s president Jennifer Evans-Cowley sent out a campus-wide email explaining what UT Arlington knew and what resources were being made available to support students and coordinate a response to the revocations.
“We do not have the specifics behind the decisions to revoke visas,” Evans-Cowley said. “We are committed to helping our international student community to ensure they receive necessary support.”
As of publication, no Texas university has explained the federal rationale behind the specific visa status changes. However, that has not stopped speculation and fear from running rampant. In an April 9 Dallas Morning News article, it was speculated that schools like UT Dallas may have faced revocations because of pro-Palestine protests that occurred in the spring of 2024. A spokesperson for the UT Dallas chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine said that their members had not been targeted yet, but that as part of the UTD community, they were extremely concerned about this extreme action and the university’s failure to address it.
“We see this is a tactic to create a culture of fear within the university student movement and to suppress and silence people who will now fear that they will be deported for making a political statement,” the spokesperson said. “We refuse to be intimidated by these acts of suppression.”
Possible Future Threat
Miguel Colinas, an officer in a statewide student coalition known as Texas Students for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, said that students are going to have to step up and support their communities and that the visa revocations wouldn’t just affect the students who lost their visa status but would have resounding effects on the psychology of current international students and prospective students.In a 2024 report, the Institute of International Education found that the U.S. was home to over one million international students who, in total, contributed $50 billion to the U.S. economy. Colinas said that this attack on international students, which seemed almost entirely arbitrary, would impact both the students and the economy. Colinas said that students wouldn’t want to leave to study in the U.S. if they had to live under constant uncertainty and the threat of deportation, which in turn could lead to a decline in international students overall and the contributions they make to the U.S. economy.
“It completely eliminates our academic credibility to prospective international students when your host country might suddenly choose to kick you out of the country,” Colinas said. “Students won’t be able to get the stability they need if they are scared of the sudden loss of their visa for saying anything that could be perceived as critical of the U.S. or its actions abroad. Every international student I have spoken to since the announcement has just said that they have this constant fear of deportation if they choose to speak up for themselves.”
David Baker, the UT Dallas student government legislative chair, said it would be abhorrent if the government used visa revocation as a political tool to suppress dissenting voices. Even if a student was just on a visa, they still had constitutional rights to free speech and shouldn’t have to fear everything suddenly being taken from them because they dared to speak out of turn.
“The U.S. is taking incredibly dangerous steps if we are just revoking visas because of speech,” Baker said. Baker and Colinas added that the best thing students could do was work together and get informed, and that non-profits and student organizations should focus on sharing know-your-rights leaflets with students so that they can be ready in the event of a worst-case scenario.
“We obviously don’t know who these students are, but if something like this is happening across all our Texas campuses, then something is clearly wrong and somebody needs to step in,” Baker said. “The university should be the group that provides that to their students since the students are fully paying to attend the institutions.”
The Higher Education Immigration portal provides a detailed breakdown of rights generally afforded to international students and institutions like Yale and the University of Indianapolis provide their students with know-your-rights guides for their specific regions. In a statement to NPR, Ramsey Judah, a lawyer with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that the policy of visa revocation and mass deportations was curbing the ability for people to protest by scaring them into submission.
“It’s becoming a very insecure and strange time for this republic,” Judah said. “We’re seeing it across the board because people now are scared to speak up, not just on Palestine.”
