Half of US visa termination cases involve Indians: Lawyers’ association

NEW DELHI: About half of the 327 international students who had their visa revoked by the Donald Trump administration are Indians, says a policy brief issued by the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

AILA quotes a “verified source” to claim that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has terminated as many as 4,736 records in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), the US Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) online system of tracking foreign students, since Trump became president for the second time on January 20. Most of the students who had their status revoked were on F-1 non-immigrant student visas, reports the association.

Congress leader Jairam Ramesh has expressed concerns over the report. Sharing AILA’s note on X, Ramesh urged the external affairs minister to raise this issue with his US counterpart. “The reasons for revocation are random and unclear. There is growing fear and apprehension,” the member of parliament wrote on X.

The MEA has said that Indian missions in the US are in touch with affected students.

F-1 visas revoked, OPT programme

The 327 termination cases, which AILA was able to trace through attorneys, students, and university employees, overwhelmingly involved Indians, with Chinese students being a distant second at 14%. South Korea, Nepal and Bangladesh were also mentioned as the countries of origin of the targeted students.

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The US states of Texas, California, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Illinois, Massachusetts, Florida and Virginia have been listed as the ones with the highest number of terminations.

AILA also found that around half of the impacted students were on Optional Practical Training (OPT) - graduates employed in the US. The organisation said that these students are unable to work due to the removal of their SEVIS record and face a harder time getting their status reinstated.

Of the instances reviewed by the immigrant lawyers, only 57% students reported receiving a notice about revocation of visas, with most of them being informed through e-mail by their respective consulates.

The organisation discovered “severe lags” between SEVIS termination and notices, which may cause trouble to students if they continued to work without knowledge of this termination. “This is particularly concerning because the universities are not receiving proactive notice from the federal government that a SEVIS record is terrninated. Unless the university seeks out this information or a student prompts their university to check, the student would be unable to take steps to prevent any cascading immigration ramifications,” reads the note from AILA.

The organisation raised an alarm about ICE aggressively targeting international students, even those without a history of protests. In fact, only 2% of the students reported engaging in political protests, but around 86% of them reported some interaction with the police.

However, 33% of them had their cases dismissed without being prosecuted or having any charges filed. The organisation said that most of the police interactions would be considered as “daily occurrences” by US citizens.

“It is clear that transparency, oversight, and accountability are needed to prevent further arbitrary visa revocations and SEVIS record terminations. Finally, there should be a way for students to appeal SEVIS terminations that are inaccurate without facing a gap in their employment or requiring the university to be involved, given the sheer numbers of those impacted,“ said the organisation.