California AI doctoral students completed Sevis’s records (digital proof of valid student visas) and put their immigration status at risk.
Speaking to TechCrunch, students who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation said they were notified via their international student centre that they had been identified in criminal history checks. The student said he had studied in the United States for nearly a decade, beginning as an undergraduate, and had no criminal history.
“The most likely cause could be interaction with the police years before I entered graduate school,” the student said. “I was researching in the AI field and planned to continue my research after graduating.”
Over the past few months, more than 1,000 international students in the United States have held visa statuses challenged by the State Department and immigration customs enforcement agencies as part of an aggressive crackdown coordinated by the Trump administration. In many cases, universities are not directly notified by relevant federal agencies, and students rarely notify or rely on them.
Yisong Yue, a machine learning professor at Caltech, told TechCrunch that the US government’s hard-line stance on student visas “has harmed the talented pipeline.”
“The cumulative effect makes the United States a less attractive destination for many talented researchers,” Yue said. “Studies are highly specialized so once doctoral students are drawn from a project, they can pull back the project back in months or years. Many students on the visa are worried, beyond the specific students and projects that are affected.”
There are very few agencies that do not spare due to crackdowns. The reports show that students attending Ivy League College, large public universities and small liberal arts schools have suspended their visas. The government accuses some of these students of supporting Palestinian extremist groups and engaging in “anti-Semitic” activities, while others have targeted minor legal violations, such as speeding and other traffic violations.
Some of the withdrawals seem to be administrative errors. One student, Soogle Onda, a PhD candidate for Computer Science at Brigham Young University, recovered the disbanded student visa without explanation shortly after the immigration lawyer filed the lawsuit. Attorney Adam Crake said the government will use AI to screen visa holders without human verification, leading to errors.
Last week, a Georgia judge issued a temporary restraining order in the case of around 100 international students whose visas have been revoked, directing the government to restore students’ legal status. However, the ruling applies only to a small percentage of students at risk of deportation and could challenge the line.
Yue noted that international students have contributed to many recent technical breakthroughs in AI. Ashish Vaswani, who moved to the US to study computer science in the early 2000s, is one of the co-creators of Transformer, an inventive AI model architecture that supports chatbots like ChatGpt. Wojciech Zaremba, one of Openai’s co-founders, received his PhD in AI from NYU on a student visa.
A recent analysis by the Nonprofit Education Association NAFSA found that international students from US universities contributed $43.8 billion to the domestic economy during the 2023-2024 academic year, helping to hire more than 378,000 people.
Yue says she’s having “multiple conversations” with senior AI researchers who are worried about staying in the US.
“This includes professors from top universities and researchers from companies such as Openai and Google,” he added. “The cumulative effect of government actions is that it makes the United States a less attractive destination for many talented researchers.”
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