Most colleges across the nation are gearing up to protect foreign-born students and faculty members who could be vulnerable when President-elect Donald Trump takes office, including those involved in pro-Palestinian protests and undocumented immigrants.
Colleges don’t know quite what to expect at this point, but campaign promises and policy discussions, including Project 2025, present possible threats to scores of students and faculty members. Trump could reinstate travel bans for certain countries, restrict or delay visas, deny federal funding to colleges that offer financial aid to undocumented students, and even call for deporting undocumented students.
“There is a lot of fear and anxiety,” said Rebecca Hamlin, professor of legal studies and political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Some campus leaders and immigration advocates are advising foreign students and professors to return to campus from winter break before Trump takes office, carry copies of immigration documents in case they are stopped by law enforcement, and invest in travel insurance if travelling abroad.
Many higher education leaders fear that Trump’s isolationist and anti-immigration rhetoric could discourage talented foreign students and professors from coming to the United States.
Enrollment of new international students declined by about 8 percent between 2016 and 2019, according to data from Open Doors, largely due to “visa restrictions and heightened screening processes under the Trump administration,” said Miriam Feldblum, executive director of the President’s Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration.
Most colleges across the nation are gearing up to protect foreign-born students and faculty members who could be vulnerable when President-elect Donald Trump takes office, including those involved in pro-Palestinian protests, and undocumented immigrants.
Colleges don’t know quite what to expect at this point, but campaign promises and policy discussions, including Project 2025, present possible threats to scores of students and faculty members. Trump could reinstate travel bans for certain countries, restrict or delay visas, deny federal funding to colleges that offer financial aid to undocumented students, and even call for deporting undocumented students.
“There is a lot of fear and anxiety,” said Rebecca Hamlin, professor of legal studies and political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Some campus leaders and immigration advocates are advising foreign students and professors to return to campus from winter break before Trump takes office, carry copies of immigration documents in case they are stopped by law enforcement, and invest in travel insurance if traveling abroad.
Many higher-education leaders fear that Trump’s isolationist and anti-immigration rhetoric could discourage talented foreign students and professors from coming to the United States. Enrollment of new international students declined by about 8 percent between 2016 and 2019, according to data from Open Doors, largely due to “visa restrictions and heightened screening processes under the Trump administration,” said Miriam Feldblum, executive director of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration.
Declines in international student enrollments over the next few years would be a devastating cultural and financial loss for colleges, many of which are already struggling to keep a balanced budget amid declining populations of US college-aged students, according to several higher-education leaders and professors. Schools rely on foreign students as a critical source of revenue because most pay the full cost of attendance. Foreign talent is also crucial for fostering innovation and conducting groundbreaking medical and scientific research, colleges say.
“We want to have a student body with students from everywhere, and the truth of the matter is, Massachusetts needs an infusion of talent from people who come here all over the world for our workforce,” said Marty Meehan, president of the University of Massachusetts system.
More than 82,000 international students study in Massachusetts, said Rob McCarron, chief executive of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts.
“The higher-education system in the US is still the envy of the world, and even more so in Massachusetts, with the incredible array of institutions that are here,” McCarron said.
Lawyers are helping some of the 400,000 undocumented students studying at US colleges to apply for more protected immigration statuses through employers, while also preparing to defend students who could be detained because of travel bans or mass deportation orders.
“Things may get harder, but we’re with you, and we’ll do what we can to support you, and we want you here,” said Dan Berger, a partner at the immigration law firm Curran, Berger & Kludt in Northampton, and a visiting scholar at Cornell Law School, describing the message he has offered on two Massachusetts campuses that invited him to offer legal seminars to students this month.
On the campaign trail, Trump made mass deportations of immigrants without legal status a top campaign issue. The Project 2025 governing plan, which Trump has disavowed but has support from many of his aides, calls for eliminating “sensitive zones,” which include places where there are limits on federal immigration raids, such as schools and college campuses. Project 2025 also calls for denying access to federal student loans for public colleges that offer in-state tuition to undocumented students, as Massachusetts public colleges and universities do. The state declined to comment.
Trump has also repeatedly promised to deport international students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests this spring and summer.
“When I am president, we will not allow our colleges to be taken over by violent radicals,” Trump told a crowd in New Jersey in May. “If you come here from another country and try to bring jihadism or anti-Americanism or antisemitism to our campuses, we will immediately deport you.”
Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, declined to answer questions about how Trump’s immigration policies might affect college campuses but said in a statement that he will follow through on “the promises he made on the campaign trail.”
“President Trump will marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation of illegal criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers in American history while simultaneously lowering costs for families,” Leavitt said.
Some institutions are trying to prepare amid the uncertainty. UMass Amherst recently advised foreign students, faculty, and staff to return to campus before Trump takes office on Jan. 20, and offered housing for undergraduates who return early from winter break. Northeastern University, which enrolls more international students in the United States than any college in the nation besides New York University, according to the Institute of International Education’s Open Doors report, said late last week that foreign students, faculty, and staff should return to the United States by Jan. 6, when Congress will certify the Electoral College vote count for Trump.
The Old Chapel and the Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts campus in Amherst.
Berger, the immigration lawyer, visited UMass Amherst and Amherst College in recent weeks to speak with students about what they need to know. The Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, a coalition of more than 500 campuses, recently held a last-minute “post-election briefing” online for college administrators on a Friday afternoon to discuss immigration issues and over 1,200 people tuned in, said Feldblum, executive director of the alliance.
“That’s just one data point that [shows] there is interest, concern, anxiety,” Feldblum said.
María Gabriela Pacheco, president and CEO of TheDream.US, a national scholarship fund for children who were brought to the country without documentation, said she is concerned about the possibility of students losing access to in-state tuition programs, and about the possibility of students being detained.
“This is a vulnerable population,” Pacheco said. “The rhetoric hurts their mental health and ability to stay focused. Something you can control is your education; it’s powerful and can’t be taken away from you.”
Many institutions are reluctant to even discuss the potential concerns, or their preparations to address them, publicly. More than a dozen Massachusetts colleges did not respond to or declined requests for comment for this story, though legal advocates who are helping them were more open in describing how they are preparing to help foreign and undocumented students.
Most colleges are working “more behind the scenes than in 2017 because they fear that the new administration may put a target on their backs if they do so publicly,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, professor of immigration law practice at Cornell Law School in New York.
Trump and his allies have made higher education a prominent target in recent months, promising to “reclaim” universities from the “Marxist maniacs and lunatics” who he says control them.
The chaos and fear on college campuses in the early days of 2017, when Trump signed the so-called Muslim travel ban shortly after he first took office, remains a vivid memory for many college administrators. Students and professors were stranded or temporarily detained in airports. Lawyers and law students jumped into the fray to help.
Visa processing slowed for many foreign students and faculty during Trump’s first term, and some faced increased scrutiny while trying to come to the United States. Berger said he is advising students and professors to file visa applications early.
International enrollment at US colleges and universities dropped further during the COVID-19 pandemic, when travel restrictions were implemented to mitigate the spread of the virus; the numbers have since rebounded. There were 1.13 million international students in the most recent academic year, a 7 percent increase from the year prior, according to Open Doors.
“Candidly, it’s taken us a while to get the number of international students back up again after the first Trump administration,” Meehan said.
Julia Dan, a junior at Harvard University from Canada, said she is not worried about her own status or her future in Cambridge, but she is concerned about many of her peers, especially foreign students with organizing roles in the pro-Palestinian movement on campus.
“It speaks to the larger intolerance American politicians [have] toward college students engaging in protests,” Dan said. “It should show how important it is to rally behind these students.”
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