Marco Rubio Says He's Revoked 300 Student Visas Over Campus Activism
"We're looking every day for these lunatics that are tearing things up," Rubio said in a Thursday press conference.
Over the past several weeks, a handful of student visa holders and other legal residents have faced deportation for nebulous allegations that they supported terrorism—often being detained and taken away by immigration officials with seemingly no due process, or even an allegation of criminal wrongdoing. Shockingly, the number of affected individuals has reached into the hundreds. On Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio revealed that he has personally intervened to cancel the visas of around 300 students.
"It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa." Rubio said during a Thursday press conference. "At some point, I hope we run out because we've gotten rid of all of them, but, we're looking every day for these lunatics that are tearing things up."
"We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not become a social activist that tears up our university campuses. And if we've given you a visa and you decide to do that, we're going to take it away," Rubio added. "We don't want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country. But you're not going to do it in our country."
Rubio's move to personally revoke the visas of legal residents is part of a broader plan to "catch and revoke" the legal statuses of student activists and other individuals who engage in pro-Palestine or otherwise vaguely "pro-terrorism" speech. The effort involves "AI-assisted reviews of tens of thousands of student visa holders' social media accounts," according to Axios.
Earlier this month, immigration officials seized Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder and the leader of student protests at Columbia University. Khalil was taken to Louisiana and is currently legally challenging the Trump administration's attempt to deport him. However, the Trump administration hasn't just gone after protest leaders. So far, students who merely attended protests or co-authored relatively milquetoast pro-Palestine op-eds—as in the case of Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk—have been targeted by immigration officials.
"Credible accusations against Israel include accounts of deliberate starvation and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide," reads the most strongly worded portion of the op-ed Ozturk co-wrote. The op-ed also later calls on the "University to end its complicity with Israel insofar as it is oppressing the Palestinian people and denying their right to self-determination." While the op-ed condemns Israel's war in Gaza decisively, no one in good faith could argue it expresses support for Hamas (though even if it did, it would still undoubtedly be First Amendment-protected speech.) On Thursday, Rubio did not directly state why Ozturk was detained when asked. Instead, he made general comments about student protestors.
For an administration that has vowed to "restore freedom of speech," so quickly moving to remove legal residents for disfavored political speech is bitterly ironic—if not exactly surprising.
