International students and Arab travellers to the US are increasingly finding that their visas can be revoked overnight, with their plans upended by a single email.
In Indiana, Hamza — an alias for a Saudi Arabian nursing student in his second year — learned in a meeting with international student affairs that his study visa had been halted and that he must leave the United States immediately, only to discover that an email had already been sent.
He traced the deportation order to an old traffic offence already adjudicated and not previously considered a deportable issue; he had even received a new visa after losing his passport, Hamza told The New Arab.
After President Trump took office, his administration embarked on the largest crackdown on international students to date.
Hamza’s status is complicated.
"I am a government-sponsored employee under a five-year study and five-year work programme," he explained. "If I fail to complete the programme, I must repay every dollar the government spent on me, including monthly stipends," a fear heightened by the prospect of failing to transfer to a university in Australia or the UK quickly enough.
But this climate of fear extends beyond campuses.
Student and tourist visa cancellations have become routine, framed by the US State Department as daily border-protection measures.
In August, the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the cancellation of 6,000 student visas because of overstays, offences, or “support for terrorism”.
The US is home to 1.1 million international students, of which an estimated 90,000 are from the Middle East.
Officials also ordered new scrutiny of 55 million visa holders against law-enforcement databases and social media, searching for signs of hostility toward the United States or antisemitism or support for terrorist groups. These vague categories can apply to peaceful posts backing Palestinian rights or campus activism.
Those expansions built on a 2019 policy requiring social media disclosures for visa vetting, later accompanied by AI-driven monitoring of posts deemed supportive of groups such as Hamas or other violations.
Pro‑Palestinian views penalised
Saif al‑Islam Eid, 30, a researcher at the Doha-based Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, told The New Arab his B1 tourist visa, valid to 2027, was cancelled, ending his ability to attend conferences central to his work.
“I learned that my visa was revoked in an email from the US embassy in late July,” Saif said. “I believe it was because of my pro‑Palestinian stance.”
Legal experts say this is precisely where US law and practice collide.
Eyad al‑Samhan, a lawyer specialised in US immigration law, told The New Arab that “First Amendment guarantees the right to free expression, and the US government cannot impose a particular orientation for people’s views or force them to support one side of a conflict over another… no one can override the Constitution, neither the president nor Congress.”
He argues that publishing a post on social media should not strip someone of their rights and that the government has become more stringent in cancelling tourist and student visas for perceived risk indicators, such as social media activity, minor traffic offences, or even infractions that once had no immigration impact.
“This expansion is not limited to Arabs or Middle Eastern students and increasingly impacts migrants from many regions, especially from countries with large immigrant populations,” added Eyad.
A visa can be cancelled at any time without a clear reason, including at the airport, says sources.
Never-ending rejections
Susan, an alias for an Egyptian woman who adopted a son from a non-Arab African country she preferred not to disclose, described accompanying her son to renew his annual student status.
“During the renewal interview, they asked him to provide his social media accounts and open them to ensure compliance with US policies,” Susan told The New Arab. “My son doesn’t post anything related to politics or terrorism.”
Yet his visa was put on hold and ultimately denied on the grounds that he had “no ties to his home country,” a rationale Susan described as “flimsy”, adding that he was unable to return to attend his third year or to even pack his things and sell his car.
From the West Bank, Abdul Rahman, who also preferred to use a pseudonym for fear of reprisal, recounted a planned trip to the US to visit relatives with his mother and wife as tourists.
“I received the visa in February and planned to travel in April, but in mid‑March I was shocked to get an email saying my visa had been cancelled,” he told The New Arab. “The embassy gave no reason. I have no political activity on the ground or on social media to justify the rejection.”
Consular frictions are intensifying as well. Eyad notes that fewer embassy personnel now operate under direct US administrative control, increasing executive influence over which staff implement presidential policy priorities and which do not.
“Those deemed uncooperative can be sidelined, compounding already difficult procedures for Middle Eastern applicants,” he explained.
Rights eroded
Even US citizens are not immune to the ripple effects of these new policies.
Egyptian‑American Mustafa Ahmed helped his parents obtain green cards to live with him, but when they developed serious health complications while visiting Egypt, they remained there for three years on their doctors’ advice.
“When my parents lost their green cards, we went to the embassy in Cairo to request a travel permit, but the embassy refused because they were in Egypt,” Ahmed told The New Arab.
“This is legally incorrect because we submitted medical records, and their green cards were still valid.”
His parents are now deprived of health insurance, treatment, access to their bank accounts or their children.
On US campuses, fear has redrawn the lines of permissible student speech.
A representative of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Stanford who preferred to remain anonymous told The New Arab in an email interview that deportations of peaceful protesters have occurred nationally, even if not in direct connection with a specific Stanford protest.
“The State Department’s threat to revoke or deny visas based on social media screening has led many international students, especially activists, to delete their accounts,” the source said.
They describe the directive as intentionally vague, deploying phrases like “potentially derogatory” content or “any indications of hostility toward the citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles of the United States,” language that grants broad discretion to State and Homeland Security and leaves students on F, M, and J visas particularly vulnerable.
The SJP representative says federal pressure has also encouraged universities to conflate Palestine advocacy with antisemitism, weaponising that label through Title VII complaints that claim solidarity protests make some feel uncomfortable.
They note that these complaints give Washington a pretext to investigate universities, threaten enormous fines, as seen at Columbia, or even jeopardise a school’s ability to host international students, as in the Harvard case, and that Stanford has faced the same campaign.
“Under this pressure, Stanford has intensified repression through an Orwellianly named free speech policy that confines rallies and amplified sound to a single daily ‘free speech hour,’ while targeting student groups and members supporting Palestinian human rights and moving against student co‑ops under allegations of ‘antisemitism’ and ‘anti‑white bias,’” they added.
Marco Mossad, a political analyst and member of the Middle East Policy Council in Washington, told The New Arab that there is a political logic behind the escalations.
He argues that Trump’s anti‑immigrant posture serves the MAGA movement, which is his core base, and counters what he describes as Biden’s border opening to undocumented migrants.
“The MAGA movement hates immigrants and considers them a threat to American values, customs, and traditions,” Marco said. “It frames migrants as consuming state resources and altering the country’s demographic fabric.”
He warns that the administration’s quest to identify visa holders who support groups such as Hamas or hold anti‑American ideas is so elastic that it can justify cancelling any visa. He stresses that the measures touch people of all nationalities, not only Arabs or supporters of Islamist movements.
“But the pendulum may swing back,” he concludes, “as the politics of immigration shift with each election cycle.”
Immigration is a pivotal domestic issue that influences US elections, he says, adding that Trump leveraged incidents tied to undocumented migration because Biden’s border policies were at the other extreme.
“The only difference is that the breadth of Trump’s actions put them under constant media scrutiny.”
For Hamza, Saif, Susan’s son, Abdul Rahman, and Mustafa’s parents, these national battles and bureaucratic shifts impact every aspect of their lives.
“I don’t know if my son will ever be able to go back and get on with his life,” says Susan.
Mariam Ehab is a journalist, screenwriter, and TV editor, specialising in human interest stories and investigative journalism
This piece is published in collaboration with Egab