May 30, 2025
The Trump administration has ordered U.S. embassies and consulates to pause scheduling new interviews for student visa applicants while they mull over a requirement subjecting all foreign students applying to study in the U.S. to social media vetting. If the administration follows through on this plan, it will significantly slow down student visa processing and financially affect universities relying on tuition paid by foreign students, which is often significantly more than that paid by American students.
Additionally, on Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced in a statement that “the U.S. State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.” They will also increase scrutiny of all future visa applicants from China and Hong Kong.
A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to lift its pause on humanitarian parole applications from individuals from Afghanistan, Ukraine, and many Latin American and Caribbean countries. “It is not in the public interest to manufacture a circumstance in which hundreds of thousands of individuals will, over the course of several months, become unlawfully present in the country, such that these individuals cannot legally work in their communities or provide for themselves and their families," District Judge Indira Talwani wrote in her order.
In an ironic turn of events, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has continued to release migrants charged with being in the country unlawfully to nongovernmental shelters along the border. This is after the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) sent a letter to these border shelter organizations telling them that providing migrants with aid and temporary housing may be in violation of a law which makes it a felony offense to bring people across the border illegally or transport them within the U.S. Both ICE and FEMA are agencies within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The Trump administration has also touted that it has mostly ended the practice of releasing people who cross the border illegally into the U.S., with data from Border Patrol indicating that only 7 people were released into the country between February and April, but these numbers don’t account for those released by ICE, which is data that is not publicly available.
