The New York Times began a Wednesday report on President Donald Trump’s student visa crackdown aimed at criminals and terror sympathizers with a lament that fewer Iranian nationals will be attending U.S. colleges this year.
“Many Iranians are not going to American universities this fall,” the report begins, adding, “Students from Afghanistan are having trouble getting to campus.” The Times goes on to note that new international student enrollment in American universities “seems certain to drop—by a lot.”
The Trump administration has revoked more than 6,000 student visas for overstays and criminal activity—including 200 to 300 who have expressed “support for terrorism”—a State Department official said on Monday, according to Reuters. The crackdown comes amid heightened concerns over illegal immigration and a surge in anti-Semitic incidents, some involving student visa holders, since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel.
Foreign students have led many of the anti-Israel protests. Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil, an Afghan national who worked for the Hamas-tied U.N. agency UNRWA during the October 7 attack, has refused to condemn the terrorist group. The Trump administration detained Khalil in March after revoking his visa and green card, though a federal judge ordered his release in June. Momodou Taal, a British and Gambian dual national who studied at Cornell and led anti-Israel protests on his campus, said he takes his “cue from the armed resistance in Palestine.”
The Iranian government, meanwhile, actively supports the anti-Israel protests. Last July, then-director of national intelligence Avril Haines assessed that the Islamic Republic was organizing and paying anti-Israel protesters in the United States to sow division ahead of the 2024 election. Months earlier, Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei openly praised the anti-Israel student protesters as “a branch of the Resistance Front.”
The Trump administration in April announced plans to start using “antisemitic activity on social media and the physical harassment of Jewish individuals” as grounds to deny green cards, student visas, and other immigration benefits. An Axios report days earlier noted that the administration was also considering barring universities from enrolling foreign students if too many of the students are “pro-Hamas.”
“Every institution that has foreign students … will go through some sort of review,” an official said at the time. “You can have so many bad apples in one place that it leads to decertification of the school.”
