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Trump administration continues to target international students. What to know and what could be next.
Lawsuits, next-day countersuits, backtracking and mass confusion. International students find themselves at the center of a dizzying legal landscape as the Trump administration continues to crack down on immigration.
Here’s what to know as the Trump administration keeps attempting to put up legal barriers to international students’ ability to study in the U.S.
What’s the latest?
Just Wednesday, a judge granted Harvard an extension on an injunction that blocked the administration’s attempt last week to stop the Ivy League school from enrolling foreign-born students.
An estimated 4,700 or more foreign-born students have been impacted since the Trump administration began revoking visas and terminating legal statuses in March. A few have also been detained in high-profile cases.
In just the past two weeks, students across the country were granted a nationwide injunction against the administration. Some scholars have been released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well. Meanwhile the State Department announced that it is “aggressively” targeting an additional group of Chinese scholars out of national security concerns.
But in spite of its legal losses, the federal government has doubled down on its efforts to target international students. On Tuesday, the Trump administration stopped scheduling new student visa interviews for those looking to study in the U.S., according to an internal cable seen by NBC News. Meanwhile, the State Department is preparing to expand its social media screening of applicants, the cable said.
The next day, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the government would be looking to revoke the visas of Chinese students “with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.”
It’s still unclear what “critical fields” the administration will be looking into and what types of connections to the CCP are under scrutiny. The State Department referred NBC News to comments by spokesperson Tammy Bruce during a news briefing Thursday in which Bruce said the department does not discuss the details of its visa process due to privacy concerns.
“We use every tool that we have to vet and to make sure we know who’s coming in,” Bruce said. “In this particular case, the United States is putting America first by beginning to revoke visas of Chinese students as warranted.”
How did the Trump administration revoke the visas and statuses of international students?
For months, there was mass confusion among schools and international students about the criteria the government used to abruptly terminate visas and statuses, with little to no notice to students. But in late April, the Department of Homeland Security revealed at a hearing that it used the National Crime Information Center, an FBI-run computerized index that includes criminal history information.
The agency said fewer than two dozen employees ran the names of 1.3 million foreign-born students through the index, populating 6,400 “hits.” And from there, many students experienced terminations of their records in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), which maintains information about nonimmigrant students and exchange visitors.
The method was sharply criticized by legal and policy experts, who pointed out that the database relies on cities, counties, states and other sources to voluntarily report their data. This means that it may not have the final dispositions of cases, potentially leading to errors in identifying students.
At another hearing in April, Elizabeth D. Kurlan, an attorney for the Justice Department, said that going forward, Immigration and Customs Enforcement will not be terminating statuses based solely on findings in the crime information center. She also told the court that ICE would be restoring the legal status of international students who had their records terminated until the agency developed a new framework for revocations.
Shortly afterward, an internal memo to all Student and Exchange Visitor Program personnel, which is under ICE jurisdiction, showed an expanded list of criteria for the agency to terminate foreign-born students’ legal status in the U.S., including a “U.S. Department of State Visa Revocation (Effective Immediately).” Though students would typically have the right to due process and defend themselves before their status is terminated, visa revocation itself is now grounds for the termination of status, according to the memo.
The administration has also taken aim at students who have been active in pro-Palestine protests, including Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk, who were both detained in March. Öztürk has since been released from ICE custody.
“Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas,” Rubio said at a news conference in March.
Has anyone been successful in challenging the Trump administration?
Students across the U.S. from Georgia to South Dakota have been winning their lawsuits against the Trump administration, with judges siding with plaintiffs and allowing them to stay in the U.S.
Last week, a judge issued an injunction blocking the Trump administration from terminating the legal statuses of international students at universities across the U.S. It’s the first to provide relief to students nationwide.
The day after the Trump administration terminated Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification — a move that would force the university’s foreign students, roughly a fourth of its student body, to either transfer or lose their legal status — the Ivy League school sued the administration. And hours later, a judge issued an injunction.
In addition to Öztürk, others who were detained are no longer in ICE custody, including Georgetown scholar Badar Khan Suri and Mohsen Mahdawi, a U.S. permanent resident who was born and raised in a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.
The judge in Khan Suri’s case ruled that his detention was in violation of the First Amendment, which protects the right to free speech, and the Fifth Amendment, which protects the right to due process.
What might be next for international students?
Though the recent nationwide injunction provides some relief, students can still be vulnerable to visa revocation. Legal experts say the temporary restraining order blocks the government from arresting or detaining students, or terminating their legal statuses. But it’s possible that visas can still be revoked. And many expect the Trump administration to hit back.
“This is a federal district court decision. It is not a final decision, and it seems likely that the executive branch will appeal this decision,” Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School.
Mukherjee also added that the Chinese international students referred to in Rubio’s new statement are likely not protected by the injunction either.
“What they’re likely to claim in court in defense of this policy is that the secretary of state and the executive branch deserves deference with regard to quote, unquote, foreign affairs,” Mukherjee said.
However, with backlash already brewing, Mukherjee said she expects that the policy will be challenged legally, with immigration attorneys and activists arguing that it is unconstitutional.
Legal experts said that with many decisions surrounding international students’ fate far from decided, foreign-born scholars should first and foremost remain in the country. She also said it’s important to seek legal counsel in the event that students are also eligible for other forms of relief, including asylum or other humanitarian visas.
Razeen Zaman, director of immigrant rights at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, said it’s particularly important for American citizens to speak out against the immigration policies on behalf of foreign-born students, as many of these students may not be able to push back themselves.
“You have to have a certain amount of resources to be able to do that. You have to have a certain amount of connections. There’s even some people who are too afraid to seek counsel,” Zaman said. “U.S. citizens have the most protections. … And the reality is, even if you’re stopped at the border, they do have to still let you in as a U.S. citizen.”
And given how the Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Trump administration to revoke the temporary legal status of more than 500,000 immigrants from four Latin American countries, Zaman said, it’s likely that even more groups will be targeted without fierce advocacy and protest.
“This is about the First Amendment today. It’s Chinese people, the CCP, whoever they decide is tied to the Chinese government,” Zaman said.
Virginians approved a new congressional map on Tuesday that would aggressively gerrymander the state in the Democrats’ favor, giving the party as many as four more U.S. House seats.
The new map draws eight safely Democratic districts and two competitive districts that lean Democratic, according to a New York Times analysis of 2024 presidential results. It leaves just one safe Republican seat, compared with the five seats the G.O.P. holds on the current map.
The proposed map was drawn by Democratic state legislators and approved by Gov. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat. It eliminates three Republican-held seats in part by slicing the densely populated suburbs in Arlington and Fairfax Counties and reallocating their overwhelmingly Democratic voters into five congressional districts, some stretching more than a hundred miles into Republican areas.
Perhaps the most extreme new district is the Seventh, which begins at the Potomac River and stretches to the west and south in a manner that resembles a pair of lobster claws. Several well-known Virginia Democrats have already announced their candidacies and begun campaigning in the district.
Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche speaks as FBI Director Kash Patel listens during a news conference at the Justice Department on Tuesday in Washington.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
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Jacquelyn Martin/AP
WASHINGTON — The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted Tuesday on federal fraud charges alleging it improperly raised millions of dollars to pay informants to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said.
The Justice Department alleges the civil rights group defrauded donors by using their money to fund the very extremism it claimed to be fighting, with payments of at least $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to people affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans of America, the National Socialist Party of America and other extremist groups.
“The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred,” Blanche said.
The civil rights group faces charges including wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering in the case brought by the Justice Department in Alabama, where the organization is based.
The indictment came shortly after SPLC revealed the existence of a criminal investigation into its program to pay informants to infiltrate extremist groups and gather information on their activities. The group said the program was used to monitor threats of violence and the information was often shared with local and federal law enforcement.
SPLC CEO Bryan Fair said the organization “will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff, and our work.”
Blanche said the money was passed from the center through two different bank accounts before being loaded onto prepaid cards to give to the members of the extremist groups, which also included the National Socialist Movement and the Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club. The group never disclosed to donors details of the informant program, he said.
“They’re required to under the laws associated with a nonprofit to have certain transparency and honesty in what they’re telling donors they’re going to spend money on and what their mission statement is and what they’re raising money doing,” he said.
The indictment includes details on at least nine unnamed informants were paid by the SPLC through a secret program that prosecutors say began in the 1980s. Within the SPLC, they were known as field sources or “the Fs,” according to the indictment. One informant was paid more than $1 million between 2014 and 2023 while affiliated with the neo-Nazi National Alliance, the indictment said. Another was the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America.
The SPLC said the program was kept quiet to protect the safety of informants.
“When we began working with informants, we were living in the shadow of the height of the Civil Rights Movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators, and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system,” Fair said. “There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives.”
The center has been targeted by Republicans
The SPLC, which is based in Montgomery, Alabama, was founded in 1971 and used civil litigation to fight white supremacist groups. The nonprofit has become a popular target among Republicans who see it as overly leftist and partisan.
The investigation could add to concerns that Trump’s Republican administration is using the Justice Department to go after conservative opponents and his critics. It follows a number of other investigations into Trump foes that have raised questions about whether the law enforcement agency has been turned into a political weapon.
The SPLC has faced intense criticism from conservatives, who have accused it of unfairly maligning right-wing organizations as extremist groups because of their viewpoints. The center regularly condemns Trump’s rhetoric and policies around voting rights, immigration and other issues.
The center came under fresh scrutiny after the assassination last year of conservative activist Charlie Kirk brought renewed attention to its characterization of the group that Kirk founded and led. The center included a section on that group, Turning Point USA, in a report titled “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2024” that described the group as “A Case Study of the Hard Right in 2024.”
FBI Director Kash Patel said last year that the agency was severing its relationship with the center, which had long provided law enforcement with research on hate crime and domestic extremism. Patel said the center had been turned into a “partisan smear machine,” and he accused it of defaming “mainstream Americans” with its “hate map” that documents alleged anti-government and hate groups inside the United States.
House Republicans hosted a hearing centered on the SPLC in December, saying it coordinated efforts with President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration “to target Christian and conservative Americans and deprive them of their constitutional rights to free speech and free association.”
On the night of her resounding win in last fall’s election for Virginia governor, Abigail Spanberger told her supporters that they had sent a message to the world. “Virginia,” she said in the opening lines of her victory speech, “chose pragmatism over partisanship.”
But even then it was clear that the first big issue of her term would be as partisan as it gets: a proposed amendment by her fellow Democrats to allow them to gerrymander the state’s 11 congressional districts.
The push to redraw the Virginia map was another salvo in a barrage of redistricting spurred by President Trump in a bid to keep Republicans in control of the House in this year’s midterm elections.
Virginians vote on Tuesday on whether to adopt the proposed map, and if the “Yes” vote wins, Democrats could end up with as many as 10 seats, up from the six they hold now. The redistricting battles of the last year would end up in something of a draw, with gains for Democrats in California and Virginia offsetting gains for Republicans in Texas, Missouri and North Carolina — unless Florida lawmakers decide in the coming weeks to draw a new, more Republican-friendly map.
Historically, redrawing of congressional maps has been done each decade after the U.S. census. But with Republicans holding such a slim majority in the House, Mr. Trump began by pressing Texas to redraw its maps, touching off the wave of gerrymandering
Virginia Democratic legislators rolled out their redistricting plan last October, setting in motion the state’s lengthy amendment process just as the campaign for governor was entering its final weeks. At the time, Ms. Spanberger expressed support for the plan, though she emphasized that its passage was up to the legislature and then to the voters.
But even if her formal role in the process was relatively minor — Ms. Spanberger signed the bill setting the date for the referendum — the politics of the effort has loomed over the first few months of her term. Her support for the amendment has drawn accusations of hypocrisy from the right and complaints from some on the left that she has not been outspoken enough in her advocacy.
“There’s always going to be somebody who wants me to do something differently,” the governor said in an interview on Saturday at a rally in support of the amendment outside a home in Northern Virginia. “I will always make someone unhappy, and I will always make someone happy.”
Ms. Spanberger, a former C.I.A. officer and three-term congresswoman, won a 15-point victory in 2025 after running on a campaign focused on pocketbook issues. Centrism has been her political brand since she was first elected to the House in 2018, flipping a district that had long leaned to the right.
Now Republicans campaigning against the amendment have made Ms. Spanberger a prime target, deriding her as “Governor Bait-and-Switch” and highlighting an interview in August 2025 in which she said she had “no plans to redistrict Virginia.”
“This was the perfect opportunity for her to show that she is the middle-of-the-road suburban mom that she portrayed herself as,” said Glen Sturtevant, a Republican state senator. He dismissed the notion that this was an effort that had been thrust upon her, pointing out that she had signed the bill setting the date for the referendum. “She is certainly an active participant in this whole process,” he said.
Republicans have eagerly highlighted recent polls suggesting that Ms. Spanberger’s honeymoon is over, though because governors in Virginia cannot serve two consecutive terms, public approval is less of a pressure point than it might be elsewhere. Some of her political adversaries have tied the drop in her ratings to her involvement in the campaign for the amendment.
But a number of factors are at play in those sagging poll numbers. Some on the right are irked by her support of standard Democratic priorities like gun control measures and limits to cooperation with federal immigration agents.
But some of the most vociferous criticism of her from Republicans, up to and including the president, has been for a host of proposed taxes and tax hikes in the legislature — on everything from dog grooming to dry cleaning — that she in fact had nothing do with. Most of those taxes, which were floated by various lawmakers, never even came up for a vote.
But Ms. Spanberger did not publicly hit back against these attacks until recent days, a delay that some Democrats say was costly.
“She let other people define her,” said Scott Surovell, the State Senate majority leader.
Mr. Surovell’s frustration echoed a growing discontent among Democrats about the governor’s recent moves. For all the Republican criticism of her, some operatives and lawmakers said, Ms. Spanberger has not been aggressive enough in pushing for Democratic priorities, redistricting among them.
This criticism broke out into the open in recent days, after the governor made scores of amendments to bills that had passed the General Assembly. Some lawmakers and Democratic allies accused her of unexpectedly diluting long-sought goals like expanded public sector unions and a legal retail marketplace for cannabis.
“Our party base is looking for us to stand up and fight and advocate and deliver,” said Mr. Surovell, who represents a solidly Democratic district in Northern Virginia. “It’s hard to deliver when you’re standing in the middle of the road.”
In the interview, Ms. Spanberger insisted that she supported the purpose of many of the bills but had to make amendments to ensure that her administration could implement them.
And she said she had been explicit in her support of the redistricting effort, appearing in statewide TV ads encouraging people to vote “Yes” even as an anti-amendment campaign has sent out mailers suggesting that the governor opposes the effort.
But she said she had never been in a position to barnstorm the state as Gov. Gavin Newsom did in the months leading up to the redistricting referendum that passed in California. Mr. Newsom is a second-term governor in a much bluer state, she said, while she only recently took office and has been “in the crush of their legislative session,” with hundreds of bills to read and examine in a short period.
“Those who may not be focused on the governing and only on the politics, they’re going to want me to do politics 100 percent of the time,” she said. “And for people who care about the governing and not the politics, they’re going to want me to do governing 100 percent of the time.”
Her preference, as she has often made apparent, is for the governing over the politicking. But she acknowledged that it is all part of the job.
Asked if she lamented that the highest-profile issue of her term so far was such a polarizing matter, rather than the cost-of-living policies she emphasized on the campaign trail, she said: “Any person in elected office wants to talk about the thing they want to talk about all the time, and that’s it. So I won’t say ‘No’ to that question.”
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