According to a campus-wide announcement published Monday by Rhode Island School of Design President Crystal Williams, an undergraduate student has had their visa revoked.
“A revocation of one’s student status is rare, personally and professionally impactful, and especially heartbreaking,” she said in her statement.
Williams wrote that the RISD’s Office of International Students and Scholar Affairs noticed the revocation because it regularly checks on the status of its international students. According to Williams, the school “learned of one student whose international status was marked ‘terminated,’ a formal designation that reflects the revocation of a student’s visa status in the U.S.”
Williams said RISD would not share the student’s name in order to protect their privacy. She also wrote that RISD is offering to “help identify possible legal resources, and to the extent possible, support the student throughout this difficult moment.”
The announcement does not say why the student’s visa was revoked, or whether the student has left campus or the country.
According to a map of the more than 300 student visa revocations compiled by Inside Higher Ed, the RISD student’s revocation is the first known case of a student visa being revoked in Rhode Island since Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced his revocation of hundreds of visas on March 27. During a March 28 press conference, Rubio said that only “a few” of the visas are not related to pro-Palestinian protests.
“Some are unrelated to any protests and are just having to do with potential criminal activity,” said Rubio.
Last month, a professor and kidney specialist at Brown Medicine was deported while attempting to re-enter the United States through Logan Airport in Boston after a trip home to Lebanon. The Department of Homeland Security said Dr. Rasha Alawieh was one of the hundreds of thousands of people who had attended the funeral of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
The RISD student’s visa revocation also comes amid complaints of a curbing of free speech on the school’s Providence campus. Last week, students involved in the RISD chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine decried that their art show exhibiting pro-Palestinian protest art was moved from a publicly accessible cafe to the third floor of a building closed to the public after a group called StopAntisemitism claimed the artwork was anti-semitic.
RISD did not respond to questions by deadline about whether the student whose visa was revoked had been involved in any of the pro-Palestinian campus protests last year.
In her community-wide email, Williams said international students are “vital to RISD” and that those with F-1 or J-1 visas can contact the school’s Office of International Students and Scholar Affairs for more information or to schedule an appointment to ask questions.
