Fear and uncertainty are spreading across many US college campuses ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s January 20 inauguration, with some schools advising international students to return early from winter break amid promises of another travel ban like the one that stranded students abroad at the start of Trump’s last term.
In a country where more than 1.1 million international students enrolled in US colleges and universities during the 2023-24 academic year, the former president has pledged more hardline immigration policies upon his return to the White House, including an expansion of his previous travel ban on people from predominantly Muslim countries and the revocation of student visas of “radical anti-American and antisemitic foreigners.”
International students generally have nonimmigrant visas that allow them to study in the US but don’t provide a legal pathway to stay in the country.
On campuses from New York to California, students not only buckled down to take finals before winter break but some also braced for possible disruptions to their lives and the possibility of not being able to complete their studies. Some universities have urged students to put off or cut short travel plans outside the US before the inauguration.
Cornell University’s Office of Global Learning advised students who are traveling abroad to return before the January 21 start of the spring semester or to “communicate with an advisor about your travel plans and be prepared for delays.”
At the University of Southern California, administrators urged foreign students in an email to be back in the US one week before Trump’s White House return, saying that “one or more executive orders impacting travel … and visa processing” may be issued.
Trump’s promise of “mass deportations” reverberates beyond critical industries such as agriculture, leisure and hospitality, construction and health care: It potentially complicates matters for some students regardless of their winter break travel plans.
Shortly after Trump made that pledge in June, however, a campaign spokesperson said that group would be limited to the “most skilled graduates” and screened to “exclude all communists, radical Islamists, Hamas supporters, America haters and public charges.”
One day after the presidential election last month, UCLA’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy reminded students that the university “will not release immigration status or related information in confidential student records … without a judicial warrant, a subpoena, a court order, or as otherwise required by law.”
Trump also vowed to reinstate and expand his previous travel ban on people from predominantly Muslim countries – which limited travelers from Iran, Libya, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. The administration later extended the travel ban to include several African countries. President Joe Biden revoked the travel ban after he took office in 2021.
With the specter of restrictive immigration policies, other US universities – among them schools in New England – have offered resources and issued guidance.
Harvard University’s International Office advised students and scholars to “budget time ahead of the semester start, prior to the January Martin Luther King holiday” to avoid disruptions or delays. Wesleyan University, in a letter to students traveling abroad, recommended they return by January 19 amid “uncertainties around President-elect Donald Trump’s plans for immigration-related policy.”
“The best way to anticipate or predict what will happen in the second Trump administration is to look at what happened in the first administration, and what we saw in the first Trump administration was an effort to restrict the entry of foreign born (students and workers) throughout every category,” Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonpartisan research organization, said during a recent post-election briefing hosted by the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration.
