HUNDREDS of international students are being forced to leave the United States after the Trump administration began aggressively revoking student visas.
The U.S. would drastically reduce its diplomatic footprint in Africa and scrap State Department offices dealing with climate change, democracy and human rights, according to a draft White House order.
“Do not attempt to remain in the U.S. The federal government will find you,” read an email reportedly from the Department of Homeland Security, shared by immigration lawyer, Nicole Micheroni.
With some students reportedly arrested without prior notice, many students say they were not given clear reasons. Some of the students targeted were neither protesters nor charged with a crime, said lawyer Dustin Baxter, who’s suing the government on behalf of more than 100 affected students.
“Not only would they revoke the person’s student visa – even if there was no conviction, if there was just an arrest, and sometimes there wasn’t even an arrest, there was just an encounter and maybe a ticket – they would revoke the student visa,” Baxter said as quoted by CNN.
Some foreign students say the first notice they received about their visa revocation was not from ICE but from their school.
Meanwhile, many universities received no formal notice of their students’ visa revocations and found out only by seeing a student’s name in government records, school officials say.
After four students and two recent graduates of Stanford University in California had their visas rescinded, the “University learned of the revocations during a routine check of the SEVIS database,” it stated on April 4.
THE executive order, framed as a strategy to cut costs while “reflecting the priorities” of the White House, also outlines measures to slash U.S. soft power around the world.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said The New York Times, which first reported the existence of the draft order, had fallen victim to another hoax.
“This is fake news,” Rubio posted yesterday via X.
However, a copy of the draft viewed by AFP calls for a “full structural reorganisation” of the State Department by October 1 this year.
The aim, the draft states, is “to streamline mission delivery, project American strength abroad, cut waste, fraud, abuse, and align the Department with an America First Strategic Doctrine.”
The biggest change would be organising U.S. diplomatic efforts into four regions: Eurasia, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia-Pacific, with no equivalent focus on Africa.
