One student at Brown on a student visa and a “small number” of recent alumni on post-graduate student visas have had their visas revoked. That’s according to an email obtained by The Public’s Radio sent by the Brown University Office of International Student and Scholar Services to its international students and scholars.
“We recognize that this continues to be a time of heightened anxiety and uncertainty for many of you and that this has only been further exacerbated by recent news,” the email read.
News of the revocations comes just three days after the Rhode Island School of Design announced that one of their undergraduate students had their visa revoked.
Brown’s Office of International Student and Scholar Services did not release the names of the affected student or the alumni on the Optional Practical Training (OPT) visa, nor the reasons the Trump administration revoked their visas. The OPT visa is a common way for international students to stay in the United States for a year following undergraduate or graduate studies. On that visa, they are allowed only to work in the disciplines they studied.
Inside Higher Ed has compiled a map of where over 600 international student visas have been revoked at more than 100 colleges and universities. According to their reporting, the number of revocations has doubled since last week. Academics have pointed out that this newer round of visa revocations may be targeting students from Asian countries.
During a March 28 press conference, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said only “a few” out of the previous round of revoked visas were not related to pro-Palestinian protests.
“Some are unrelated to any protests and are just having to do with potential criminal activity,” said Rubio.
These visa revocations appear to be the first among the student or recent graduate populations at Brown, though 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.
A European doctoral student at Brown who did not want to be identified publicly out of fear of retribution from the federal government said she sees this as a way to crush activism on campus.
“No one is safe. This is not to remove specific dangerous individuals, it’s about suppressing political dissent,” she said.
