'No One Is Providing Any Reasoning': How the Federal Immigration Crackdown Is Reshaping Life for International Students

The message arrived on a Thursday morning, routed through the Department of Homeland Security's automated systems. For a graduate student at Boston University studying mechanical engineering — his identity withheld in court filings only as "Student Doe #2" — it was the beginning of a nightmare. His SEVIS record had been terminated. In plain terms: his legal status in the United States had been wiped from the federal database, and he was now, technically, subject to arrest and deportation.

His stated offense? An unspecified criminal records finding. The actual offense, his attorneys would later allege in federal court: a minor traffic violation.

This spring, his experience was replicated thousands of times across hundreds of American college campuses. Beginning around March 28, 2025, universities started noticing a disturbing pattern — active F-1 students and recent graduates suddenly appearing as terminated in SEVIS, the federal system that tracks every international student in the country. No advance warning. No due process. No explanation.

"The unexpected terminations occurred without notice or explanation," said Northeastern University's Office of Global Services in a statement to its campus community, describing how staff immediately began monitoring SEVIS records on a daily basis once the wave began. The same stunned scramble was underway at Penn, Columbia, MIT, and hundreds of other institutions.

By late April, inside Higher Ed had identified over 1,840 students and recent graduates from more than 280 colleges and universities whose SEVIS records had been affected. That was almost certainly an undercount. The government itself later revealed, in a court proceeding, that it had terminated the records of approximately 3,000 international students through what it called a "Student Criminal Alien Initiative" — a mass sweep that had cross-referenced student records against an FBI criminal database. The database sweeps flagged students for everything from dismissed misdemeanor charges to minor traffic stops.

Welcome to the new landscape for international students in the United States.

A System Built for Surveillance

To understand what is happening now, you have to understand what SEVIS is and what it was designed to do.

Created after September 11, 2001, the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System is a federal database that tracks every detail of an international student's academic life — their enrollment status, their address, their work authorizations, their program start and end dates. In the post-9/11 era, placing that system under the jurisdiction of ICE — Immigration and Customs Enforcement — made political sense. But it also meant that the entire infrastructure of international student life was embedded within an immigration enforcement agency, one that could, under a sufficiently aggressive administration, be turned against the very population it was supposed to serve.

International students have long understood themselves to be among the most documented people in the country. What changed in 2025 was not the surveillance architecture — it was the willingness to use it.

On January 20, 2025, the same day as the presidential inauguration, the Trump administration rescinded longstanding policies that had exempted campuses, hospitals, and houses of worship from immigration enforcement operations. Universities, which had long operated as a kind of informal safe zone, lost that protection overnight.

What followed was a cascading series of enforcement actions unlike anything higher education had seen in decades. Visa revocations by the State Department. Mass SEVIS terminations by ICE. A blanket suspension of new student visa interviews during the peak processing season for fall enrollment. An executive travel ban covering 19 countries — later expanding to 39 — that barred students from entire nations from entering the U.S. at all. Expanded social media screening. A proposed "one-strike policy" for students who run afoul of any immigration rule. And an ICE internal memo that quietly lowered the evidentiary standard for SEVIS terminations — moving away from the legal standard of "clear and convincing evidence" toward simply "evidence of failure to comply."

The Presidents' Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, a coalition of 580-plus college and university leaders, catalogued these developments in real time and called the result unmistakable: the administration had created "a pervasive climate of fear, anxiety and uncertainty among international students, faculty, and staff, severely disrupting campus life."

'I've Been Forced to Remain Silent'

That climate shows up in ways that are hard to quantify but easy to see.

An international student at Belmont University in Nashville — who did not disclose his name for safety reasons — had been accustomed to posting Instagram stories about political issues he cared about. After the new administration took office, he stopped entirely. "I've been forced to remain silent," he said. "I just decided to make a conscious decision to not risk my visa status."

When news of the SEVIS terminations broke in the spring, the same student canceled a flight home to India. He had received a speeding ticket in the past — enough, under the new enforcement regime, to potentially flag him in the federal database. His immigration attorney advised him not to travel. "I decided that it's not worth the risk," he said.

Hundreds of miles north in Boston, a medical resident called off a trip to Jordan after three residents in his program got stuck abroad waiting for their visas to be processed. Missing significant time in a medical residency, he noted, could mean repeating a full year of training — or expulsion from the program altogether. "Imagine having to do residency for three years just to have it all get thrown away," he said.

In Cape Girardeau, Missouri, at Southeast Missouri State University, a student from Bangladesh described the uncertainty in survey responses collected by the campus newspaper. They had a good experience at SEMO, they said — close friends among domestic students, mostly supportive professors. But the SEVIS situation left them shaken. What they wanted most, they said, was simply clarity. "I wish there were more clarity on what is happening with SEVIS statuses," they said.

At SEMO alone, 24 students and recent graduates had their SEVIS records revoked. International enrollment on the campus subsequently declined by nearly 500 students.

Due Process Denied

The legal challenges mounted quickly.

Within weeks of the initial termination wave, more than 100 lawsuits had been filed across the country. Federal judges granted temporary restraining orders in at least 50 cases. The judges, for the most part, were not persuaded that what ICE had done was legal.

On April 24, 2025, the Presidents' Alliance joined with several directly affected students to file a federal lawsuit in Massachusetts. The legal argument centered squarely on due process: the government had failed to provide students with advance notice or the opportunity to respond before terminating their status, in violation of the Constitution. The complaint further alleged that SEVIS terminations must be grounded in specific regulatory authority — and that a visa revocation by the State Department does not legally justify the termination of a student's enrolled status.

Among the named student plaintiffs: "Student Doe #4," a man who had completed his Master's degree in Financial Mathematics in January 2024 and was working full-time under STEM Optional Practical Training authorization. On April 3, 2025, he was notified that his SEVIS record had been terminated due to an alleged criminal records check. He had no criminal history and no police contact of any kind. He was forced to quit his job on the spot. He has not been able to return to that employer since.

On April 25, facing mounting court pressure, the Department of Justice announced that it would reverse the terminations and restore thousands of students' SEVIS records. The news was greeted with relief — and caution. Three days later, a draft internal memo revealed that ICE had simultaneously been working on a new, broader framework for future terminations, one that formalized many of the very practices that had just caused so much harm. Reports subsequently emerged that some students whose records were restored were having them re-terminated under the new rules.

As Northeastern's Office of Global Services warned its students: "A senior DHS official has confirmed that while SEVIS records have been restored, students may still face future status or visa challenges as policy evolves."

In May 2023, a federal judge in California issued a nationwide preliminary injunction blocking the government from arresting, detaining, or taking adverse action against students who had been caught up in the termination wave — even students whose records had since been restored. The court found the original terminations had caused irreparable harm that reactivation alone could not undo.

The Numbers Don't Lie

What began as a legal and human rights crisis has metastasized into an economic one.

International students at U.S. colleges contributed nearly $43 billion to the U.S. economy in the 2024-25 academic year, supporting more than 355,000 jobs. They pay full tuition — typically out-of-state rates — and they are ineligible for federal financial aid, making them one of the most financially significant segments of any university's enrollment. As Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, has noted, the relationship is direct and consequential: "Full-paying international students pay scholarships for domestic students — it's a 1-to-1 relationship."

But in fall 2025, new international student enrollment at U.S. colleges fell by 17% — the steepest nonpandemic single-year decline in over a decade, according to data from the Institute of International Education. Overall international enrollment fell 1%, the first annual decline since the COVID-19 pandemic. Graduate enrollment fell 12%.

The human scale of individual campuses tells a more visceral story. At DePaul University in Chicago, new international graduate student enrollment fell 62%. At Bellevue College outside Seattle, new international enrollment dropped 36%. At Eastern Illinois University, the total number of international students fell by half.

NAFSA and its research partners estimated the enrollment decline has already cost the U.S. economy $1.1 billion and roughly 23,000 jobs — and that is based on the real fall 2025 numbers. Earlier projections, made before the numbers came in, had warned that a worst-case scenario could produce $7 billion in lost revenue and 60,000 jobs eliminated from the higher education sector alone.

For many institutions, the damage will compound over time. Universities with already thin operating margins are announcing hiring freezes. Some are cutting programs. As Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, has bluntly assessed the outlook: "What we are going to see is programs shut down, campuses shut down, smaller public or private institutions closing or merging."

The 2025 figures may not even represent the bottom. As one enrollment management expert told U.S. News, 2026 will be "the real litmus test" — the first year when students will have had an entire application cycle to factor the current political climate into their decision about whether to pursue an American education at all. Guidance counselors in China are already steering students toward universities in Hong Kong and Singapore.

What Universities Are Doing — and What They Can't

Institutions have responded as best they can, though the range of their power is constrained.

At Northeastern, the Office of Global Services began manually reviewing every student's SEVIS record on a daily basis. At Penn, administrators issued campus-wide guidance on how to respond if ICE agents appeared. Universities across the country have trained public safety staff on protocols for immigration encounters, reminded faculty of restrictions on sharing student data, and quietly updated their FAQ pages to account for scenarios that would have seemed unthinkable two years ago.

Some institutions have offered affected students the ability to continue coursework remotely from abroad — a workaround that preserves their academic progress without requiring them to navigate a legal status that may or may not be active on any given day.

What universities cannot do is make the fear go away.

Ola Galal, a clinical assistant professor of global cultures at NYU, described what she has been hearing from students in her office: students of color, students from Muslim-majority countries, students with political opinions they used to express openly, now coming to her with questions about whether it is safe to leave campus for a holiday weekend, let alone go home for the summer. They do not have answers, because she does not have answers.

The American ideal that drew many of these students to the U.S. in the first place — the sense of openness, of meritocracy, of a country that welcomed talent regardless of origin — feels, to many of them, newly conditional.

"When we learned about America when we were kids, it was always this is where all the cultures meet up," said Helmer Larsen, an international student at SEMO originally from Norway. "That's what we kind of learned — the American dream is all these different people coming from all these different countries and bringing their cultures together."

She paused. "America does not have the reputation it once did."

What Comes Next

For now, the legal battles continue. The Presidents' Alliance has pressed its case in federal court. Congressional members have sent formal letters demanding that DHS and the State Department answer basic questions — how many SEVIS records terminated since January 20 have never been restored? How many students who had their records reinstated have since been re-terminated?

The administration, meanwhile, has shown little sign of retreating. A proposed rule would end "duration of status" — the flexible standard that currently allows students to remain in the U.S. through the completion of their degree — and replace it with a fixed, inflexible expiration date. Another proposed rule would restructure the H-1B visa lottery in ways that could make post-graduation employment harder to obtain.

For the hundreds of thousands of international students still in American classrooms this semester, the situation demands a kind of cognitive split: stay enrolled, keep studying, and try to maintain a normal academic life while carrying the knowledge that a database entry or a policy memo they never see could unravel everything they have worked for.

The Boston University student, "Doe #2," got his SEVIS record restored after the April reversal. Whether it stays restored, whether he can finish his degree, whether he can pursue the career in the U.S. he came here to build — these remain open questions. His future, as the lawsuit filing put it, was "abruptly jeopardized." It has not yet been secured.

"International students are in a state of stress and anxiety like never before," the Belmont student said. "No one is providing any reasoning for what's going on."