U.S. universities are providing help to foreign students to withstand President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, including by advising them not to leave the country and guiding them on how to move on to graduation.
Citing over two dozen students, immigration attorneys and university officials, Reuters reported that some university advisors are quietly telling foreign students to hire a lawyer and keep attending classes while waiting for the outcome of the legal appeals.
According to the report, university faculty and academic groups have taken legal action against the Trump administration’s targeting of their students. On April 24th, the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, an alliance of U.S. college and university leaders supporting immigrant, international and refugee students, filed a lawsuit, in Boston, challenging “the unlawful mass termination” of foreign students’ lawful status.
Trump’s crackdown is said to negatively impact the U.S. economy, and diverse skills and knowledge international students bring to the university. Noting that a record 1.1 million international students are in the country, the Association of American Universities, a higher education advocacy group, said the $44 billion they contributed to the US economy last year are at stake.
Moreover, Sally Kornbluth, president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said hers “is an American university, proudly so – but we would be gravely diminished without the students and scholars who join us from other nations.”
This comes as the U.S. continues with its crackdown on pro-Palestine activism. Thousands of foreign students were also targeted for deportation over minor offenses and arrests.
Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University, was arrested last month in Somerville, Massachusetts. According to a statement from the university’s president, the arrest was linked to her pro-Palestine views expressed in a co-authored article.
Also last month, federal authorities arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and a Palestinian activist who helped organize campus protests against Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza across the U.S. last year.
Khalil has been facing deportation despite being a legal permanent resident in the United States. Earlier, the Department of Homeland Security arrested Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian student who had taken part in protests at Columbia University, for allegedly overstaying her F-1 student visa.
Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7, 2023, after the Hamas resistance movement waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime’s decades-long violence against Palestinians. Since the start of the offensive, the Tel Aviv regime has killed at least 51,439 Palestinians, according to the health ministry of Gaza.
