More than 500 student visas revoked as the government expands reasons for deportation

(CNN) — Kseniia Petrova’s path from a Harvard laboratory to an immigration cell began with frogs.

The Russian national who has been working as a researcher at Harvard Medical School failed to declare “non-hazardous” frog embryos she was carrying with her on her return to the US from France in February, Petrova’s attorney said. Rather than issue a fine, Petrova’s exchange visitor visa was revoked, and she was taken into custody.

Revoking Petrova’s visa was “a punishment grossly disproportionate to the situation,” her attorney, Greg Romanovsky, said, calling the error on the customs form “inadvertant.”

CNN did not receive a response from the Department of Homeland Security to a request for comment, but the department told ABC News, “Messages found on (Petrova’s) phone revealed she planned to smuggle the materials through customs without declaring them.”

Petrova now sits in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Louisiana, ICE records show, waiting for a June 9 hearing that could end with her return to Russia, where Petrova’s attorney says she would face immediate arrest over her previous outspoken opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“Her detention is not only unnecessary, but unjust,” Romanovsky said.

And Petrova isn’t the only one.

CNN has reviewed court filings, statements from attorneys and announcements from more than 80 universities and colleges around the country and confirmed that more than 525 students, faculty and researchers have had their visas revoked this year.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last month the State Department, under his direction, revoked more than 300 visas, with most of those being student visas.

The earliest high-profile cases focused on those accused of supporting terror organizations, as was the case with Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest following pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University.

Now, an increasing number of student deportation threats involve the revocation of visas based on relatively minor offenses like years-old misdemeanors, according to immigration attorneys, or sometimes no reason at all.

The targeting of foreign nationals affiliated with prestigious American universities comes amid the Trump administration’s larger immigration crackdown, including claiming broad powers to declare some migrants gang members and deporting them without a hearing.

“All of these tools that exist in the (immigration) statute have been used before, but they use them in a way that causes mass hysteria, chaos and panic with the hope that students won’t get proper legal advice and they’ll just, through attrition, leave the country,” said Jeff Joseph, president-elect of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Hundreds of people associated with colleges facing possible deportation

A visa is a document that allows people to legally enter the US at an airport or border crossing, and it is not unusual for student visas to be revoked for a variety of reasons, Minneapolis-based immigration attorney David Wilson told CNN. But forcing people already in the US to immediately leave the country is something very different, he said, especially in the middle of an academic term.

“A visa is like the key to start a car,” Wilson said. “It’s quite different, though, to stop the car in the middle of the street and tell the person they have to get out.”

That difference is at the heart of the lawsuit filed Monday by a Dartmouth graduate researcher from China. Xiaotian Liu – a computer science student who has studied in the United States since 2016 – asked a court for a temporary restraining order to keep the government from throwing him out of the country.

Liu’s F-1 student visa was revoked, something his attorneys acknowledge the State Department has the right to do, but they say that doesn’t give ICE the ability to immediately force him to leave the US, especially since he was given no explanation for it.

“He has not committed any crime or even a traffic violation,” his attorneys said in a court filing. “Nor has he shown any violence (or even participated in any protest) in the United States or elsewhere.”

A federal judge in New Hampshire granted Liu’s request for a temporary restraining order Wednesday. CNN reached out to DHS for comment on Liu’s case.

Immigration arrests often happening without warning, attorneys say

Even visitors who have been given reasons for their deportation are often surprised by what they hear.

A graduate student at the University of Minnesota, Doğukan Günaydin, was detained by ICE on March 27 because of a prior drunk driving conviction, a senior Homeland Security official told CNN.

In a court filing, Günaydin’s attorney says online records show that his visa revocation wasn’t official until seven hours after he was taken into custody while on his way to class, according to CNN affiliate KARE.

Wilson, who is not involved in Günaydin’s case, said driving while intoxicated is grounds to revoke a visa, but he’s never seen it used to kick someone out of the country.

“Saying that your (legal) status is ended because of that, there’s no precedent for that,” he said. “There’s no authority for that.”

While the Department of Homeland Security has publicly touted many of its efforts to deport students and faculty, the process of revoking a visa is handled by the State Department, which has been more tight-lipped.

“Due to privacy considerations, and visa confidentiality, we generally will not comment on Department actions with respect to specific cases,” a spokesperson told CNN in response to questions about multiple incidents.

More than 1.5 million people were in the US in 2023 under F-1 and M-1 student visas issued by the State Department, according to a government report. And about 300,000 people per year are in the US under J-1 visas to participate in various exchange programs, including programs at universities, the State Department says.

Courts become last resort for students looking for answers

In many cases, immigration attorneys have said, the Trump administration declined to provide any details on their visa revocation decisions unless forced to do so in court.

In the case of Khalil, it was only after he filed suit that the government cited his failure to state he had previously worked for the British Embassy in Beirut and was an unpaid intern with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. By the time his case got a hearing, he had already been moved more than a thousand miles away to custody, in Louisiana.

Students and families aren’t the only ones being left in the dark. Several universities – including the University of Texas at Austin, Stanford University and UCLA – said the government never directly informed them that they had students whose visas had been revoked. In many cases, schools learned of the decision only after checking a government database and discovering authorization had been revoked without a specific explanation.

“The termination notices indicate that all terminations were due to violations of the terms of the individuals’ visa programs,” UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk in a statement to students and faculty Sunday.

Many students have had their visas revoked with no further action taken to this point, while some have been taken into custody with the authorities’ intention to deport them.

“The very public actions that are being taken by ICE and the Department of Homeland Security around some of these students, where they are removing these students from their homes or from their streets, that’s not usually done unless there is a security issue when a student visa is revoked,” Sarah Spreitzer with the America Council on Education told the Associated Press. “The threat of this very quick removal is something that’s new.”

The lack of certainty about what is leading some scholars to lose their right to study in the US is sending a chill through the international student community.

“I think I want to speak in the name of everyone here, we are feeling anxious,” said a freshman on a student visa enrolled at one of Philadelphia’s renowned universities.

CNN granted the student anonymity for fear of retaliation.

“We feel anxiety because we don’t know what’s going to happen,” the student explained in an interview with CNN between a day filled with work-study, classes and homework. “People could be targeted without being related to something, you know?”

Government encourages people with revoked visas to leave without hearings

Some students are receiving notification of the loss of their legal status, often accompanied with the suggestion that they “self-deport” rather than challenge their deportation in court and face the risk of being detained. CBP One, an online application that Customs and Border Protection used to schedule arrivals for people seeking asylum during the Biden administration, was changed last month to “CBP Home” to allow people to notify the government that they will voluntarily leave the US.

“The CBP Home app gives aliens the option to leave now and self-deport, so they may still have the opportunity to return legally in the future and live the American dream,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement. “If they don’t, we will find them, we will deport them, and they will never return.”

Jayson Ma, a 24-year-old Chinese national who has been in the United States since 2016 on a valid student visa, learned his visa was revoked after his university, Carnegie Mellon, called to inform him.

“I have my suitcase half-packed and it’s something I’m mentally preparing for,” Ma told CNN. “I just want my life to go back to normal, I want to go back to school, finish school and not have to worry about getting arrested.”

The threat of being forced out of the United States permanently is being coupled with a financial cost. The Department of Homeland Security stated in a social media post that the agency could fine an immigrant $998 per day for remaining in the country after receiving “a final order of removal.”

Among those who have chosen to leave are Momodou Taal, who had been told to turn himself in to immigration custody while his case was being heard in the courts.

“I have lost faith I could walk the streets without being abducted,” Taal said on X.

As the immigration cases slowly work their way through the courts, the speed and unpredictability of the move to deport immigrants who were in the country legally is alarming a lot of Wilson’s legal clients.

“I have individuals who naturalized 10 years ago asking if they have a parking ticket, can they travel?” he said. “People are being terrorized because of the uncertainty that the slightest contact with law enforcement will trigger a consequence that will unravel their life in the United States.”

CNN’s Jeff Winter, Danny Freeman, Yash Roy, Gloria Pazmino, Maria Aguilar Prieto and Javon Huynh contributed to this report.

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