International student anxieties facing Trump crackdown
- La Voz Latina
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read
By: Sophia da Silva
In the past month, the Trump administration has launched a crackdown on international students, beginning with the arrest of Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil. While the arrests began clearly targeting students involved with pro-Palestine protests, they’ve become increasingly unrelated.
International students make up more than two-fifths of the graduate student population at the University of Maryland.
“I've talked to people who are like, ‘I'm just waiting every day for ICE to show up at my door,’” said Rose Ying, a fifth-year neuroscience Ph.D. candidate and Graduate Labor Union (GLU) organizer.
The Diamondback reported on April 9 that some UMD students have had their visas revoked. It was confirmed on April 17 that seven students were affected.
“Students are more constantly checking in on each other because you don't really know what's going to happen. You don't really know what to anticipate,” said one third-year international Ph.D. student who has asked to remain anonymous.
The Ph.D. student said they’ve nearly wiped their entire social media presence. It’s one of the many things they and other international students have done to try and protect themselves, but the line on what is and isn’t “allowed” isn’t clear.
“People are even scared to talk about their actual research online,” they said. “If you have your name associated with machine learning or AI or deep learning, there’s a fear that that’s enough to get flagged.”
A master’s student from Mexico said they have even been wary of looking certain things up.
“There's a sense of fear among international students to do a lot of things now,” they said. “Everything's changing, and you never really know what's gonna come back to haunt you.”
Part of the advice International Student and Scholar Services sent out to this university’s international community was to limit international travel.
“We don't see our family, so we can't just go home; it's a trip, it's expensive,” said the master’s student. “Now with the added fear of if you do go home, there's a chance you might not be able to get back and finish your degree that you've worked so hard and spent so much money on.”
The Ph.D. student has been an international student for the majority of their adult life and has gotten used to living away from home. But they made a promise to themselves: once a year, they get to go home.
“Once a year, you get to be with family. And this, genuinely, will be the first time in my life that I might potentially spend a full year, like a full calendar year, without going home,” they said. “So that's a horrible adjustment.”
Their parents are also getting older, so they’ve had to weigh the possibility that if there is a medical emergency, they have to make a decision on whether or not to go home knowing they might not be able to come back.
The master’s student said they’ve also been running hypotheticals in their head of what could happen.
“I think, for a lot of us, this is starting to become like a worst-case scenario situation that we never thought we would be in,” they said.
For the master’s student, the lack of information from the university isn’t helping.
“The International Student & Scholar Services Office , they sent us an email that they were gonna have office hours, like open office hours for two hours a week, which is not a lot,” she said. “There's a lot of uncertainty about what the government is trying to do and what could actually potentially happen and just because there's no information about it, there's no information being relayed to the students.”
Ying and the GLU have been campaigning for the university to be more communicative with students about what they know and what it could mean for the university.
The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party sent a letter on March 19 to the presidents of several universities, including University of Maryland President Darryll Pines. The letter asks the administration to answer a series of questions about Chinese faculty, students, and staff at the university. The letter is similar to a proclamation from the first Trump administration that claims Chinese students are used by China as collectors of U.S. intellectual property.
The GLU pressured the administration not to respond to the letter. The administration was worried that by not responding, they’d invite more negative attention. Now, the GLU is asking that the university be transparent with the rest of the campus about the information they’re sharing with the government.
“The quote I think I heard was like, ‘We wanna protect the campus by not drawing attention to ourselves.’ But we are the campus. If you're not protecting us, your students, your staff, your faculty, there's nothing left,” Ying said.
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