‘I live very cautiously:’ International students in the US fear deportation

Momodou Taal is a doctoral candidate in Africana Studies at Cornell University. 

“I look at how countries that have experienced colonialism reclaim sovereignty, particularly focused on political economy,” Taal told The World. “My kind of particular focus is on West Africa, and I look at Ghana and Guinea in the era of independence.”

But right now, the 31-year-old’s dissertation work must be done entirely online from an undisclosed location outside the United States. The dual British and Gambian national chose to self-deport from the US last month, after the government revoked his student visa. 

Taal was a prominent leader of student protests supporting Palestine on Cornell’s campus a couple of weeks after the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. While he notes that he publicly condemned the killing of any civilians, he received criticism for his social media posts, including one that said “Glory to the resistance!” in support of the attack that left almost 1,200 Israelis dead.

The Department of Homeland Security says the PhD student has advocated for violence and extremism.

Taal rejects the claim, and he says he has no regrets.

“I think if having a visa is contingent on having a moral conscience, then I think I always choose my moral conscience over my ability to stay in the US,” Taal explained.

Over the past two months, the Trump administration has said it’s targeting students like Taal for deportation, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio told conservative commentator Ben Shapiro.

Rubio went on to say that most of the students are having their visas revoked because they committed some kind of crime, not because of what they’ve said. 

But Yale Law School professor Muneer Ahmad says that students targeted by the government haven’t all been charged with a crime.

“What seems to be happening now is that people who have old infractions, even very minor contact with the criminal justice system, or even cases in which they were charged with something and where the charges were dropped, those are being used as grounds to deny people entry or to revoke their visas, in some cases,” Ahmad said.

What’s also happening, though, is that students without any clear infractions, who didn’t participate in protests and had no contact with the law, are seeing their legal status in the country change, without being alerted by the government. 

“I feel like I am not very secure. At any minute, especially when I am driving, I worry, will I make any legal violation?” said an international student at Dartmouth, a private university in Hanover, New Hampshire, who asked not to have her name or voice used on air when The World interviewed her. “For example, if I drive too fast, will I get pulled over by the police, and then I will have a record? So, I would say I live cautiously, trying not to break any law.”

After connecting with a half dozen students around the country, this student, originally from China, was the only international student willing to speak. And that’s because a fellow Chinese student at Dartmouth, Xiaotian Liu, had his visa status terminated by Homeland Security, with no explanation.

“He was very shocked, because he had no legal violations,” the student said. “So, it’s all very surprising. … Nobody knows the reason. Even the school, they don’t know the reason.”

DHS declined to comment on Liu’s case out of privacy concerns. 

In response to The World’s question about the student visa issue, the State Department offered this comment by email: 

“The Department of State will continue to work closely with the Department of Homeland Security to enforce zero tolerance for aliens in the United States who violate US laws, threaten public safety or in other situations where warranted. ”

Yale law professor Muneer Ahmad said the government’s treatment of international students should raise concerns for everyone.

“Something shouldn’t be taken away by the government without your being given notice of it being taken away and a reason for why it’s being taken away,” he said. “And those are just the basic requirements of a functioning government of a democracy, and I hope people would care about that.”

And if you put aside this concern over an existential threat to the democratic system, Barnet Sherman, who teaches multinational finance and trade at Boston University, said he has a more practical concern. 

“The international student brings with them literally billions of dollars of sorely needed funds into local communities,” Sherman said.

Most people applying to study in the US pay full price, and Sherman says all that money flowing into college towns, large and small, supports close to 400,000 US jobs nationwide.

“I mean, they’re renting apartments, they’re going grocery shopping, they’re subscribing to Netflix, they’re ordering pizza, they’re getting stuff from DoorDash and Grubhub,” he continued. “This is just a tremendous economic driver to a local community.” 

Over half of all international students in the US today come from India and China. The crackdown on visa holders, according to the Chinese student at Dartmouth, has many questioning whether they should even bother applying for schools in the US.

“I know a lot of Chinese students applying for an American university this year,” the student said. “I think they are all very anxious about the new climate here.”

While hundreds of students have reportedly seen their legal status restored since Friday, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said that a new system for processing and terminating international student records was in development.