Trump’s crackdown on students with visas and green cards sets up First Amendment showdown

Washington — The Trump administration’s crackdown on students who participated in pro-Palestinian activities have raised questions about the First Amendment rights of visa and green card holders amid the shocking detentions of a number of students at Tufts, Columbia and other universities in recent weeks. 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio cited a provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act that authorizes the nation’s top diplomat to revoke the visas of foreign national students on the grounds that their presence or activities have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” for the U.S. 

The federal government is not required to lay out proof beyond that explanation, legal experts told CBS News, setting up a legal showdown over foreign nationals’ free speech rights in the U.S. 

“There’s a tension between everyone’s First Amendment rights to free speech and the immigration statute’s broad provisions giving the secretary of state broad latitude to declare someone deportable simply because he thinks that the student may have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences. And the courts will have to figure out where the appropriate line should be drawn,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, a retired immigration law professor at Cornell University.

Rubio said Thursday the State Department has canceled more than 300 visas and that they’re “primarily” student visas. Several high-profile cases are related to students who led or participated in pro-Palestinian activities and disruptive protests, which the administration has equated to activity supporting Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. 

He also told reporters that if the administration is compelled to provide evidence in court, it will, but said “judges don’t issue student visas. There’s no right to a student visa.”

“We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses. And if we’ve given you a visa, and then you decide to do that, we’re going to take it away,” Rubio said at a news conference in Guyana. 

In targeting students, the Trump administration is enforcing the statute differently than past administrations, according to immigration lawyer Jonathan Grode. 

“This administration hasn’t changed the law,” Grode said. “They’re just telling the referees to call the game differently. They’re saying, be stricter, use all the tools you have available to effectuate this behavior. That’s the big difference. That’s why it feels so jarring.” 

“With the Trump administration, they’re pushing this to such a degree that it’s creating concern, hysteria, reaction, litigation,” he added. 

A visa revocation does not automatically result in a person’s deportation, which is handled by the Department of Homeland Security and requires due process. Several of the students are sitting in detention facilities as the government seeks to deport them. 

Rubio’s remarks came in response to a question about Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, a Fulbright scholar and Turkish national who was taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents wearing masks and in plain clothes in Massachusetts on Tuesday, March 25. 

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson alleged Wednesday that Ozturk had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas,” but did not provide details about her alleged activities. Ozturk’s friends have said she is being punished for co-authoring an opinion piece in the Tufts Daily campus newspaper in 2024, where she called on the school to divest from Israel and “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” but never mentioned Hamas.

The case followed another high-profile detention earlier this month of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University grad student who had been active in pro-Palestinian protests on campus last year. Khalil, who was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, has a green card, or legal permanent residency, and his wife is an American citizen. Immigration authorities initially told Khalil that they were acting on a State Department order to revoke his student visa, but when they were informed that he had a green card, the agent said they were revoking that according to his attorney. 

Green cards, however, cannot be rescinded as simply as visas. The government suggested in a court filing earlier this week that it could move to revoke his status for allegedly omitting information on his immigration forms, including his involvement with the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, and a group known as Columbia University Apartheid Divest.  

But at the core of the U.S. government’s detention and aimed deportation of Khalil is a rarely used section of the Immigration and Nationality Act that subjects noncitizens to possible deportation if their presence and activities are deemed threatening to the foreign policy interests of the U.S.

This same law was used to detain Georgetown University researcher Badar Khan Suri, an Indian national who was taken into custody by masked agents March 17 in Virginia. The government cited his alleged “close connections” to a Hamas official as justification for revoking the visa, saying he was “actively spreading Hamas propaganda.”

The government using that law is also trying to deport Yunseo Chung, a 21-year-old Columbia University student and legal permanent resident who has been involved in pro-Palestinian protests. Chung came to the U.S. from South Korea with her family when she was 7. 

Yale-Loehr recalled two other cases where similar powers were invoked in deportation proceedings. In 1987, it was used in a case involving eight people who either held valid student visas or were lawful permanent residents for their pro-Palestinian activism. The deportation case dragged on for 20 years and ended with a judge calling the government’s actions “an embarrassment to the rule of law.” In the 1990s, the government tried to deport a former Mexican official who was in the U.S. on a visa and faced charges in his home country. The then secretary of state said his deportation was necessary for foreign policy matters. 

Attorneys in the recent cases have accused the Trump administration of using immigration enforcement to suppress speech it disagrees with. 

Grode said the crackdown could have a chilling effect on the First Amendment. The Trump administration, which ran on a free speech platform, is “creeping in on attacking some of the very fundamental principles that make America America,” he said. Still, noncitizens having First Amendment rights “doesn’t negate the ability of the government to revoke their visa,” he added.

Yale-Loehr expects it will take years for these cases to be settled, predicting that “it’s going to be a mess.” 

“If there’s over 300 students who had their visas revoked, there’s going to be a lot of cases challenging it,” he said. “I suspect that the litigation will take years to unravel before a court and get a definitive ruling on the extent to which foreign nationals have First Amendment rights.” 

Camilo Montoya-Galvez,

Caroline Linton,

Scott MacFarlane and

Jacob Rosen

contributed to this report.