The freedoms of international students studying in the United States are currently in flux, and University of Cincinnati is at the center of the most recent change.
Under the umbrella of President Donald Trump’s all-out immigration crackdown, the administration has taken aim at international students studying in the country. Records for more than 4,700 international students in the U.S. have been removed from the Student and Exchange Visitor Information Systems (SEVIS) database, which is maintained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
But on Friday, the Trump administration reversed course. The Justice Department announced in a court filing in U.S. district court in Massachusetts that ICE will manually restore the student status for those whose records were terminated in recent weeks.
The decision comes after four international students filed a lawsuit in a California federal court against the Trump administration for canceling their immigration status to study in the country, despite having never been convicted of a crime. One of those students is Jiarong Ouyang, an international doctoral candidate at UC. More than 200 students removed from SEVIS have won court orders temporarily barring the administration from taking actions against them, according to a Reuters count.
A lawyer for a similar lawsuit out of Washington state provided The Associated Press with a copy of the government’s statement on Trump’s reversal:
“ICE is developing a policy that will provide a framework for SEVIS record terminations. Until such a policy is issued, the SEVIS records for plaintiff(s) in this case (and other similarly situated plaintiffs) will remain Active or shall be re-activated if not currently active and ICE will not modify the record solely based on the NCIC finding that resulted in the recent SEVIS record termination.”
UC student sounds the alarm
Time will tell if international students will face more legal hurdles to study in the U.S. CityBeat sat down with an international Ph.D. student at UC, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. He’s afraid to speak publicly with some international students facing deportation for exercising free speech.
“I think a lot of us are scared to say anything, no matter how small, just because of all of this,” he said. “I was never one to check who’s at the door before opening the door, because that was just never a part of my culture, and that is something that was told to us to do, because there might be immigration officers at the door, and it’s better to slip them the red card under the door rather than allow them entry. It’s very surreal and very strange.”
This student told CityBeat he’s been carrying around important documents in case he needs to prove his legal status to study in the country, which he said was suggested by International Student Services at UC. He said the university has sent emails to international students saying the government could revoke visas for extremely minor infractions.
“That email did mention that things which were reasons for those visas to be revoked were things like DUIs or even just parking ticket violations,” he said. “Since all of this, there’s been a noticeable shift in the morale of the faculty and the students because everyone’s afraid.”
Impacts on STEM
This student said the morale dip is not just about student visas, but other sweeping actions against higher education from the Trump administration.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has scaled back new grants by at least $2.3 billion since Trump took office, according to new STAT analysis, with studies on infectious diseases, heart and lung ailments and basic research into fundamental biological systems taking the biggest hits.
On Friday, hundreds of research grants for the National Science Foundation (NSF) were terminated after hundreds were already terminated last week, reports Nature. The new round of grant terminations comes one day after Sethuraman Panchanathan, the NSF’s director, abruptly resigned from the agency. Panchanathan was appointed to lead the NSF in 2019 by Trump during his first term. Trump now wants to cut the agency’s $9-billion budget by 55% and its workforce by 50%, according to Science.
The student who spoke to CityBeat said researchers like him are scrambling to work with less funding, which he said will greatly impact their work.
“We don’t know which grants are going to be funded and how much they will be funded,” he said. “Many students aren’t able to be on research assistantship support anymore, and so the teaching load is expected to go up, and things like resources for experiments or any kind of analysis, those are starting to look difficult as well. Many people are having to make changes to their thesis to deal with all of this.”
This student is worried his thesis will take a hit. He did not want to disclose the specifics of his research out of fear of revealing his identity, but he said the work is important.
“The work that I do has direct translational human health impacts, so whatever is currently being learned from my lab, some of that can immediately be translated into human health,” he said.
Between the threats to student visas and the gutting of research grants, this student told CityBeat that scientific progress is taking a huge blow in the U.S.
“I do foresee a huge influx of any kind of immigrants doing this kind of skilled work leaving the U.S.,” he said. “I think that there’s going to be huge delays and pauses in things like new drug discovery or breakthrough treatments.”
This student took a liking to Cincinnati during the course of his Ph.D. program. He only has one more year to go, and his plan was to stay in the area once he finished the program. Now, he’s not sure he’ll even stay in the country.
“I’m really probably thinking that leaving, at least for some period of time while things calm down, if they ever do calm down, is probably the best bet,” he said. “Some institutions in Germany are also gearing up to offer grants and offer positions to people who are expelled from the NIH. So I think the state of science in America is really going to be affected, and I think it might not have the strong core that it did after this.”
This student told CityBeat he’s found strength in the stories of scientists who came before him. Their dedication under duress helps him cope with the realities facing international research students today.
“Something which I’ve started to do recently is read about scientists in history who were doing their work in periods of great turmoil, so through wars or genocides and things like that,” he said. “Just reading about how they were able to overcome things like this, and their work did have significant impacts that lasted beyond them. I think that has been just a source of drive and motivation to continue and keep going.”
Follow CityBeat’s staff news writer Madeline Fening on Instagram. Got a news tip? Email mfening@citybeat.com.
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This article appears in Apr 16-29, 2025.