‘A massive headache': State Department tries to figure out how to handle Chinese student visa reviews

Yahoo

29-05-2025

People both inside and outside the State Department were struggling Thursday to understand how a new plan to revoke Chinese students' visas will work — and whether it will end up being a blanket ban on Chinese nationals studying in the United States.
While the administration could begin voiding visas imminently, a State Department official familiar with consular issues, granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said embassies had yet to receive official instructions on how to implement the plan, which also includes revising visa criteria to increase scrutiny of future applicants from China and Hong Kong.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced late Wednesday that the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security will 'aggressively revoke' visas for Chinese students with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in 'critical fields.'
But that isn't easy to put into practice, and the manner in which it is done will say a lot about the Trump administration's ultimate goals.
Reviewing all Chinese student visas could be a daunting task for the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security. There were around 277,000 Chinese students in the United States during the 2023 to 2024 school term, government data shows.
'It's wild,' said one State Department official involved in the discussions about how to implement the directives. 'It's going to be a massive headache for us.' The person, and others, were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive internal processes.
The administration may be hoping the threat alone will prompt students to reconsider attending U.S. institutions, in the same way that it has encouraged undocumented migrants to self-deport.
'That's the only reason why you would put that out there — is because you want the Chinese families who are impacted potentially by this to know,' said Carl Risch, who was assistant secretary of State for consular affairs during the first Trump administration. 'And you want to terrify them.'
Risch said it's likely the administration doesn't yet know who the policy would apply to, but that even when guidelines are established, the general public still won't know because the State Department doesn't usually advertise new vetting standards.
'You're going to implement it inside the bureau, change the guidance for adjudicating officers — often this information isn't publicly available,' said Risch, who's now a partner at the Kurzban, Kurzban, Tetzeli and Pratt law firm.
State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce declined to give details on the visa review, including how many Chinese students would be affected, the timing of the review, or the specific merits of how ties to the CCP would be assessed. 'We don't give details about what our methods are regarding visas,' she told reporters Thursday, adding 'we're not going to speculate on where this would go.'
Simply losing a student visa probably would not make a student ineligible to continue their studies on a college campus, though it could make it impossible for them to leave the U.S. without being effectively locked out.
However, if Immigration and Customs Enforcement terminates a student's record in its Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, it would likely force universities to bar them from continuing to attend and could be a step toward deportation proceedings. ICE's power to quickly terminate students' SEVIS records is the subject of intense ongoing litigation, and a federal judge in California last week issued a nationwide injunction preventing the administration from imposing 'adverse legal effect' on those whose SEVIS records have been terminated.
John Sandweg, a former head of ICE under the Obama administration, said Rubio's reference in his Wednesday statement to DHS and State working together on visa reviews indicates that the Trump administration would 'do both.'
Much of the initial vetting of Chinese students could be done via software maintained by ICE, CBP and the State Department, Sandweg said. But the CCP cases will require analysts to investigate further, he said.
Some students would leave while others, he said, might try to claim asylum or disappear in the U.S., he argued. Chinese students outside of the U.S. who are denied visas won't have much chance to protest the decision but those in the country do have the right to challenge their visa revocations in the court system, Sandweg said.
The policy could implicate tens of thousands of students and could potentially become a blanket ban on Chinese students on American campuses depending on how it is enforced.
Rick Waters, the inaugural coordinator of the State Department's China House, said he is skeptical the U.S. can 'surgically go after' parts of the Chinese student population because it would stretch the time and resources of visa-issuing consular officers.
'When we talk about the question of [determining CCP] connections, that's not something that, in my view, is workable. Even membership in the Party is not something people put on their social media,' Waters said. 'So whatever they do is going to be just changing the incentive structure for visa officers where they just reject a lot more people based on very arbitrary criteria.'
Nahal Toosi, Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein contributed to this report.