Chinese Students Rattled by Trump Plan to ‘Aggressively’ Revoke Visas

It had been all figured out, Cici Wang said. Summer at home in China, then back to get her master’s degree in Chicago. After that, if she was lucky, a job in the United States.

Now all of that is up in the air, she said, a potential casualty of a crackdown that has upended the future for more than 277,000 Chinese nationals studying in this country.

“Hopefully, I’ll be fine,” said Ms. Wang, a 22-year-old aspiring computer scientist, sitting with her parents in the stately main quad of the University of Chicago on Thursday. “But I’m not sure.”

Across the country, Chinese students reeled Thursday from Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s announcement that the Trump administration would begin “aggressively” revoking visas for Chinese students studying in the United States. More than two dozen students studying in the United States, most of whom did not want their names published for fear of retaliation, told The New York Times that they worried they could lose their academic opportunities in an instant, with little explanation.

In a statement late Wednesday, the State Department announced it was focusing on those who were studying in “critical fields” or who had ties to the Chinese Communist Party and was revising visa criteria to “enhance scrutiny” of all future applications from China, including Hong Kong.

The vague parameters had a chilling effect on Thursday as students wondered how broadly the Trump administration would apply its new criteria. Mr. Rubio did not define “critical fields,” but science students felt particularly vulnerable because American officials have expressed concerns about the recruiting of U.S.-trained scientists by China. Nor was it clear how American officials would determine which students had ties to the Communist Party.

The news came amid heightened tensions with China, a broad push to slash the number of immigrants in the United States and major headwinds in court for the Trump administration on global tariffs. China is a top target in President Trump’s trade war.

Student visas offer a potent tool for the Trump administration, if the courts allow it. Roughly a quarter of the nation’s total international student population is from China, a cohort larger than any except Indian students, according to a report published last year by the State Department and the Institute of International Education, a nonprofit group.

Professors and laboratories depend on the students’ skill as teaching assistants and researchers. At public colleges, university administrators rely on the full tuition Chinese students typically pay to help subsidize the education of in-state students.

At campuses large and small, Chinese students are an American fixture. At the University of Southern California, where international students have for decades been crucial to the campus’s academic and business model, Chinese students make up about an eighth of the 47,000-member student body.

“Our international students are vital members of our Trojan family and have been since our founding in 1880,” U.S.C.’s president, Carol Folt, said in a statement on Thursday. “This is a confusing time.”

From New York to the Midwest to California, students called the decision worse than confusing. At Columbia University, where about 6,500 Chinese students were enrolled last year, several Chinese students asked to be referred to only by their English first names, fearing retaliation from the U.S. authorities.

Caroline, 22, who just graduated with a bachelor’s degree in art history, said that she was leaving next month for Canada, where she had gone to high school.

“I’m looking forward to it,” she said. “This place doesn’t feel welcoming anymore.”

Her friend, Jack, 22, had just earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science and was going to stay to work for one year as a full-time research assistant. However, he was rethinking his plans to apply to doctoral programs because they require a five-year commitment, and he worried that his visa status could be threatened during those years. Instead, he said, he might look at Canada, Europe or Hong Kong.

The two had just been talking about Mr. Rubio’s comments and trying to figure out what they meant.

“That word ‘aggressively’ is really horrible,” he said.

At the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where Chinese students have long made up the largest share of the international student population, Elle, 24, a master’s degree candidate who had been planning to apply in the fall to a Ph.D. program, said that she couldn’t stop looking over her shoulder.

“People are worried about liking the wrong thing on social media or even getting a speeding ticket because it might mean the end of all their hard work and time in America,” she said. “In April and March, six students had their visas revoked at my university. Who’s to say I’m not next?”

In Pennsylvania, Taylor, 23, a physics major, had just graduated from a liberal arts college so small she asked that it not be named because officials might identify her. Though Chinese students there make up the largest cohort of international students, there are fewer than 100 or so.

Her mother had told her that “it’s safer to be silent,” she said, “but I think it’s also important for the American public to know that it’s just unreasonable to make international Chinese students an imagined enemy.”

She said she had planned to visit her family in China this summer but had decided against it after friends and professors advised her not to leave the country. The concern implied by the Trump administration that Chinese students might be here to conduct espionage or to work for the Chinese Communist Party baffled her.

“The majority of students are unrelated to all political matters,” she said. “Most of us are from the Chinese middle class.”

At the University of California, Berkeley, where more than 2,500 Chinese students are enrolled on student visas, Hongxian Zhang, a sophomore from Shanghai, said he had come to the United States because it had the world’s best education system.

His parents gave him some advice.

“Just follow the rules, be yourself, be a good person, don’t offend any laws, and you’ll be fine,” said Mr. Zhang, who is enrolled in global studies courses this summer.

But the administration’s announcement this week reminded him, unsettlingly, of the period during the Covid-19 pandemic when he lived in China and couldn’t get access to websites from other countries because the Chinese government had blocked them.

“I can’t say Trump is doing something bad, because he’s looking out for his own country,” he said. “I can understand that. But a country needs some interaction with the people outside your country, some international communication.”

He said his previous impression of the country had been that “America always accepts everything.” Watching the crackdown on international students unfold has been “so weird,” he said. “It’s not like the U.S.”

At the University of California, Los Angeles, Tony, 19, a freshman who declined to share his last name because he feared retaliation, agreed.

Sitting outside at a dining commons, the jacarandas like purple lace in the spring sunshine, he said that he had been drawn by the effortless beauty of Southern California and a professor he had met during a summer session. It had seemed a reward, he said, for the brutal intensity with which he had studied in China.

But since his arrival, he said, the unpredictability of his status under the Trump administration has been a constant source of anxiety. “I’m a person who worries about everything,” he said, “and I can’t stop thinking about it.”

He said he had avoided talking about his visa fears with his parents, “normal people” who don’t have the same access to news that he does. But he can’t escape the sense, he said, that he is now a bargaining chip in some larger negotiation.

“It seems like when they finished with the tariff thing, they turned to students,” he said. “It’s like a strategy.”

Asked what he would tell Secretary Rubio or Mr. Trump, the teenager laughed wearily as students chattered around him, hearts light, minds sharp, plates overflowing with pizza and salad.

“First of all,” he said, “I’m not a spy.”

Leo Dominguez contributed reporting from New York and Helen Li contributed reporting from Richmond, Va.