Why Are So Many Students in Mass. Losing Their Visas? The Answer Lies in a Little-known Database

By Brooke Hauser and Samantha J. Gross 

Globe Staff

April 15, 2025

Students at Boston University marched past the BU School of Law as they protested to demand that BU declare itself a "sanctuary campus" and protect students from the federal government regardless of their immigration status. 

At first it was just a handful of students with some connection to pro-Palestinian activity, then dozens more, many of whom had no connection to the protest movement. Now the Trump administration has abruptly terminated the legal status of nearly 5,000 international students and scholars across the country, according to the American Immigration Lawyers Association, setting off waves of fear on campuses around the country.

A good number of students are from China, India, South Korea, Saudia Arabia, and Nigeria, though they also represent countries like Egypt, Mexico, Turkey, and Jamaica. They’re studying everything from computer science and engineering to child and human development. And they now find themselves in a terrifying limbo — in the US without the permission of the federal government and at risk of arrest, detention, and deportation.

Many of the students have no idea why they’ve been targeted for “termination” — the official Immigration and Customs Enforcement designation. Was it a protest or political op-ed that sent up a red flag? An old speeding ticket, or social media post picked up by a bot?

Higher education institutions, lawyers, and student advocacy groups are also in the dark, scrambling to figure out how to safeguard students’ due-process rights.

“Nothing about this is normal,” immigration attorney Dan Berger told the Globe in his Northampton office.

In the past, changes to a student’s status were generally made by the colleges themselves, in a little-known database called the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, or SEVIS.

The database is run by ICE under the US Department of Homeland Security but is largely maintained by international student advisers or other designated school officials, who are responsible for reporting any changes to a student’s good standing such as an arrest that might affect their status, in accordance with federal regulations.

But in recent weeks, ICE has gone into its own database to terminate student statuses without consulting or alerting the institutions, the colleges say. The only way schools have found out about these terminations is by actively monitoring the database for status changes.

“A revocation is like having the key to your apartment taken away. A termination is an eviction,” explained one SEVIS user, a higher education manager, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation by the federal government. “The first means you can’t enter. The second means you can’t stay.”

The State Department is in charge of the actual visa travel document, typically stamped into a passport, that allows entry into the country. But that pre-existing visa stamp can’t help a student whose status is terminated in the SEVIS database.

Historically, students dealing with a potential status issue, like inadvertently enrolling below the required full course load, could consult with school officials to address it.

“Visa revocations were relatively rare,” said Berger, with most related to a criminal conviction.

The Trump administration’s arbitrary termination of a student’s status gives schools no chance to help fix the problem. It is, said Heather Yountz, a senior immigration attorney at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, “a clear violation” of the student’s due-process rights under the Fifth Amendment.

Miriam Feldblum, chief executive of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, said her nonprofit has heard from hundreds of presidents, chancellors, and university administrators who say that while they typically work with the government to help students request corrections or explanations, they are now effectively shut out of the process.

Neither a spokesperson for Trump nor the Department of Homeland Security responded to requests for comment. In an email, the State Department said it “looks at information that arises after the visa was issued that may indicate a potential visa ineligibility . . . pose a threat to public safety, or other situations where revocation is warranted,” such as “arrests, criminal convictions, and engaging in conduct that is inconsistent with the visa classification.”

Because the process is ongoing, and the department “revokes visas every day,”the number is “dynamic.”

The University of Massachusetts Amherst campus. To date, 13 students have had their status terminated.

University leaders have urged international students to monitor their email for revocation notices, while school officials are now logging onto SEVIS each morning to see if their students have been terminated. Meanwhile, higher education leaders are weighing the risks of speaking out when billions of dollars in federal funding could be on the line.

“This is a trap for students and for schools. If students don’t leave the country and forgo their due-process rights, they could be arrested by ICE and sent to Louisiana . . . or face deportation," Yountz said, and yet challenging a termination from within the US “feels scary and difficult for students.”

But individual students and coalitions of schools are beginning to fight back. SEVIS is at the heart of a lawsuit filed on behalf of a Dartmouth College doctoral student, Xiaotian Liu, by the ACLU of New Hampshire. Liu’s lawyers claimed that the federal government terminated his SEVIS status “for unknown and unspecified reasons” and asked the court for a temporary restraining order. A federal judge agreed last Wednesday to grant the short-term relief.

Also last week, the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, along with 86 colleges, universities, and higher ed associations, filed an amicus brief related to the American Association of University Professors v. Rubio lawsuit, which challenges the Trump administration’s deportation policies. Massachusetts institutions including Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke, and Williams colleges signed on in support of the brief, which posits that “[b]y terminating the students’ SEVIS record, the administration appears to be paving the way to arrest and deport them.”

Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell on Friday co-led a group of 19 attorneys general in filing another amicus brief, in the US District Court of Massachusetts. “When students and faculty fear deportation for expressing certain viewpoints, the entire academic experience suffers,” the attorneys wrote. “Classroom discussions become less robust, research questions go unexplored, and the pursuit of truth — the very purpose of higher education — is compromised.”

Berger and his firm, Green and Spiegel, have advised over 100 affected international students. He describes his role as “triage” — quickly connecting them to other lawyers.

Yountz hears from students nearly every day who are leaving the country voluntarily, leaving behind research and unfinished degrees. She noted the Trump administration has created a chilling effect on students who “are turning around and looking behind them and wondering if they’re next.”

Because the fear is that it could be anyone — for any reason. In the past, a status could be terminated because the student was not reporting to class (“No Show”) or receiving a different type of documentation, like a green card (“Change of Status”). But now, in many cases, the reason for termination is being listed as “Other‚” with “a vague reference to a criminal records check ‘and/or’ a visa revocation,” according to NAFSA: Association of International Educators.

“What does ‘Other’ mean?” asked the higher education manager. “It feels brand new to us.”

To many, it also feels punitive and menacing in the current climate, which reminds some advocates of SEVIS’s origins. The database was deployed in 2003 as a result of the post-Sept. 11 USA PATRIOT Act, after one of the hijackers was found to be in the United States on a student visa.

In this atmosphere, students are weighing whether it’s even worth trying to stay. Many leave voluntarily in hopes of re-applying for a visa in the future, said Chris Richardson, an immigration attorney, former visa officer, and diplomat who founded Argo Visa, a visa consulting firm. He’s spoken to students with minor infractions who are already traveling back to their native countries in hopes of protecting their record and preserving their ability to return to the US.

Those staying are living in a state of profound uncertainty. “[The practice] will no doubt decrease international enrollment in the US,” said Feldblum. “What is being done is deterring, turning away, to say clearly ‘you are not welcome here.‘”

Brooke Hauser can be reached at brooke.hauser@globe.com. Follow her @brookehauser. Samantha J. Gross can be reached at samantha.gross@globe.com. Follow her @samanthajgross.