BREAKING: Five international visas revoked at Rice
Federal authorities have revoked visas for five international affiliates at Rice — three current students and two recent graduates, university president Reginald DesRoches announced in an April 11 message to campus. It is unclear whether these visa revocations are related to involvement in campus protests.
“Rice continues to believe it can both follow the law and honor the long-held values that guide how we treat each other,” DesRoches wrote in his campuswide message.
Just a month ago, hundreds of students petitioned Rice to declare itself a “sanctuary campus,” which protects international and undocumented students from federal immigration enforcement. Despite the visa revocations, there’s been no activity from immigration officials on campus, DesRoches wrote.
Rice joins dozens of other universities witnessing federal crackdowns on their campuses. The Trump administration has revoked visas from over 800 international students, spanning 150 higher education institutions. On March 6, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio unveiled a program, titled “Catch and Revoke,” to identify “foreign nationals who appear to support Hamas or other designated terror groups,” Axios originally reported. The “Catch and Revoke” program, which uses artificial intelligence to survey social media accounts, revoked over 300 student visas within its first three weeks.
“Everyone is fair game,” a senior State Department official told Axios on March 27.
Although Rice did not explicitly say whether the five revocations were linked to pro-Palestine advocacy — three recent visa revocations at the University of Pennsylvania were “not connected to the 2024 campus protests” — some of the most publicized cases, so far, have been.
Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student who participated in pro-Palestine demonstrations on campus, was detained by ICE agents on March 8. Khalil, a legal U.S. resident, is eligible for deportation, a Louisiana immigration judge ruled on April 11.
Another student, Rumeysa Ozturk — who attends Tufts University and hails from Turkey — was arrested by ICE agents on March 25, seemingly in connection to an op-ed she penned a year prior. Both Khalil and Ozturk’s arrests mark the Trump administration’s period of new, heightened scrutiny toward international students.
In Texas, more than 100 international students’ immigration statuses have been revoked.
“Events at other universities have made it clear that we have entered a period of intensive immigration law enforcement for university communities in the United States,” Provost Amy Dittmar wrote in a campus-wide message on April 1.
In that same message, Dittmar announced a new International Travel Incident Response Team, and urged non-U.S. citizens at Rice to “carefully reconsider non-essential travel outside the United States.”
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