By Marcelina Horrillo Husillos, Journalist and Correspondent at The World Financial Review
The Trump administration is restoring visas for hundreds of foreign students who had their legal status abruptly terminated stoking panic among many who feared immediate deportation. The same administration had threatened to cut funding and impose outside political supervision, by bringing several prestigious universities to heel over claims they tolerated campus anti-Semitism, threatening their budgets, tax-exempt status and the enrolment of foreign students. Trump’s war against universities has seen him threaten to cut federal funding over policies meant to encourage diversity among students and staff.
In the weeks since Columbia’s capitulation, over 1,800 international students have had their legal status changed, students and graduates have been arrested for espousing pro-Palestinian views, and academics have been denied entry into the US for expressing criticism of Trump.
Columbia University faced a $400 million loss in federal funding, the university capitulated to alarming demands from the Trump administration including ceding control of the department that offers courses on the Middle East, empowering security officers to arrest students, and placing new restrictions on protest.
Harvard has rejected the demands of the Trump administration, taking forward litigation alongside over 250 international students across 65 cases who are challenging the government’s decision to change their legal status. President Alan Garber stated that, “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”
In Cornell university earlier this month, 200 faculty members and students gathered for a demonstration against the Trump administration’s threats. Cornell has been threatened with $1 billion in federal funding losses and announced on April 14 that the institution is suing the government.
Trump’s administration has targeted these institutions primarily because of their response to campus protests against the war in Gaza, but also over their policies on racial diversity in admissions, cooperation with immigration enforcement and allowing transgender women to compete in sports.
A thread to Free Speech and the First Amendment
As of April 25, over 1,800 international students had seen their SEVIS records terminated or visas revoked, as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration and alleged antisemitism, according to news reports and college statements. That’s far higher than Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s initial estimate of 300 students.
Rubio alleged students sought entrance into the U.S. “not just to study but to participate in movements that vandalize universities, harass students, take over buildings and cause chaos.” But aside from a few high-profile examples, it’s not clear exactly why most of the students have lost their legal status.
Attorneys for the students have argued that the revocations violate the students’ legal rights, and the fear of detention has prevented them from fulfilling their studies. Losing their SEVIS records left students vulnerable to immigration actions – and possible detention and deportation, according to Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School. The Deportation for “Pro-Palestine or Anti-Israel Political Speech” may violate the First Amendment as the Court holds.
Among the most relevant student figures whose have been taken by immigration agents or had their legal status questioned are:
- Turkish graduate student Rumeysa Öztürk was detained by masked agents in plainclothes as she walked to meet friends for dinner. She says she is being targeted over an op-ed about Gaza that she wrote in the Tufts University student newspaper.
- Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil was arrested in his university housing despite being a legal permanent resident. He says he was taken over his peaceful protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.
- Columbia University Ph.D. student Ranjani Srinivasan was accused publicly by the Department of Homeland Security of being a terrorist sympathizer, with no evidence, when she got notice that her visa was revoked. She chose to leave.
None of these students had been charged with a crime. Instead, the government is using a rarely invoked immigration act that allows the secretary of state to revoke immigration status if the secretary deems their presence a threat to U.S. foreign policy. Their cases raise concerns that more students could be targeted for their views. That alarm is found among free speech advocates across the political spectrum, including pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel groups that uphold the First Amendment for views they both agree and disagree with. Attorneys representing students across the country said that their clients had seen their records restored in recent days, according to NBC News.
Revenge and the Old Ideology Back
“I say it, and it sounds beautiful: ‘My revenge will be success,’” Trump said on a Fox News appearance in June 2024. “I mean that.”
Donald Trump came back into power making it clear he would use the public office of the presidency to extract personal revenge –Tom Foreman, Editor in Chief at CNN.
According to the New York Times, about 25 years ago Trump fell out with Columbia over a property deal, suffering a loss of $400 million – the sum he now threatens to withdraw in federal funding. Perhaps a coincidence, but more likely an ill-advised payback. It is important to note that reprisals are levied to other institutions as well, such as law firms that have assisted in cases directed towards the new administration or Trump himself. We see the contours of a particular form of rule – a “retributocracy” where the urge for revenge appears to be a key driving force for political decisions.
Under the guise of fighting antisemitism, Republicans are resurrecting an old ideological project. In his 1966 gubernatorial campaign, Ronald Reagan weaponized public frustration with campus activism to launch a broader attack on California’s university system. He campaigned on the promise to “clean up the mess at Berkeley,” casting student demonstrators as Communists, beatniks, sexual deviants, and a threat to the American way of life. He strongly opposed affirmative action, calling it “reverse discrimination,” and believed that education should service the economy, not democracy.
Once in office, Reagan slashed funding for California’s public universities and pushed to end free college education altogether. “The state should not subsidize intellectual curiosity,” he said at the time, crystallizing a vision of education as a privilege, not a public good, that has subsequently been adopted by much of the American right. But Reagan’s agenda wasn’t just about restoring order on campus. It was a strategy to restrict access to education and, with it, suppress dissent.
His contempt for working-class intellectual empowerment was made explicit by his education adviser Roger A. Freeman in 1970. “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat,” Freeman said. “That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college]. If not, we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people.” Education can be radicalizing, in other words, and shouldn’t be available to the working masses.
In 1969, Reagan and the University of California Regents granted themselves the power to review all permanent faculty appointments. That same year, under pressure from Reagan, the UCLA administration moved to fire the radical academic and activist Angela Davis from her position in the Philosophy Department, citing her membership in the Communist Party. Reagan criticized the humanities and the emerging fields of gender and ethnic studies. He promoted the idea that public universities should focus more on technical skills and job training. He cut federal spending for the arts and humanities by millions of dollars, while directing funds to STEM programs to bolster “economic and military strength.” On the presidential campaign trail in 1980, he promised to abolish the newly created Department of Education, and in the final days of his presidency, in 1988, praised an educational curriculum that celebrated “the glory of Western civilization.”
Conclusion
It wasn’t as if universities in the US had been tolerant of mass protests in the past. Universities called the cops on their students back in the 1960’s and 1970’s when they staged sit-ins for civil rights or protested against America’s war in Vietnam as well. In May 1970, the US National Guard killed four student protesters and wounded nine others at Kent State University in Ohio. That same month, two students were also killed and 12 others wounded by local law enforcement at Jackson State University in Mississippi.
It has always been in the nature of universities in the US – with their top-down approaches to running campuses – to do everything they can to suppress civil disobedience in any form, to punish students for even attempting to organise protests. With the widespread strong-armed responses to the anti-genocide protests this spring and the broad revisions to regulation at almost every campus aimed at squashing any potential renewal of such protests this fall, however, one thing is clear. Today, the American university – just like the American nation-state – is once again at peak repression. It has transformed fully into a corporate-like entity that view silencing dissent and maintaining order and obedience as part of its mission statement.
Trump’s policy on universities is not simply about campus unrest. It is about who controls knowledge, who defines the boundaries of acceptable discourse, and who gets to access the means of intellectual and political empowerment. Donald Trump is reviving this very playbook, albeit with updated language and a different set of enemies. Trump, similarly, has called universities “indoctrination centers” and vowed to “vanquish the radicals and take back our campuses.” This effort is not a break from the past but its logical continuation.
US politics are lose to the edge of falling into a totalitarian regime; this is a president who has described Hungarian President Viktor Orbán as “fantastic … There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader”. Orbán also attacked academic freedom, seizing control of numerous institutions in 2021.
Trump is not hiding his agenda; Trump 2028 merchandise is already on sale. He wants to emulate his autocratic heroes, and if he succeeds, it won’t just be Americans who suffer, but all of us.
