ICE Detaining Student Visa Holders
🔴 Abuse of Power ·
Mar 2025 onward
Summary
The Trump administration moved to revoke the visas of, detain, and deport international students over their pro-Palestinian campus speech, expression the First Amendment protects regardless of immigration status. ICE agents, some masked and in plain clothes, arrested green-card holder Mahmoud Khalil of Columbia on March 8, 2025, without charging him with any crime, and transferred him to a detention center in Louisiana. The administration then sought to deport him under a rarely used ‘foreign policy’ provision after Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a memo citing Khalil’s beliefs and statements. Similar arrests followed. A Tufts doctoral student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was detained over an op-ed. A Georgetown scholar, Badar Khan Suri, was seized outside his home and moved to a detention center in Texas. And a Cornell doctoral student, Momodou Taal, was detained for protesting. Rubio said the State Department had revoked more than 300 student visas, adding, ‘Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas,’ and Trump called Khalil’s arrest the first ‘of many to come.’ Federal judges repeatedly ordered the students released, finding they had likely been detained in retaliation for constitutionally protected speech; releasing Khan Suri, U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles wrote that ‘The First Amendment does not distinguish between citizens and noncitizens.’ After nine days of testimony in the first major trial of Trump’s second term, U.S. District Judge William G. Young, a Reagan appointee, ruled in September 2025 that the policy of targeting noncitizens for their political speech violated the First Amendment and that they hold the same free-speech rights as citizens, and in January 2026 he declared the policy unlawful and set it aside. The administration maintained that no one has a right to a visa and that it acted against support for a designated terrorist group rather than against speech.
Key Figures
Institutions Involved
Sources
- These Are the Students Targeted by Trump’s Immigration Enforcement Over Campus Activism
- Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil can be deported - immigration judge rules
- Tufts student returns to Massachusetts after release from immigration custody