Following ongoing visa revocations for international university students across the country, organizations in higher education are speaking out to advocate on behalf of those effected — including those here at Ohio State. Credit: Kyrie Thomas | Campus LTV Producer
Following ongoing visa revocations for international college students across the country, organizations within higher education institutions are speaking out to advocate on behalf of those affected — and Ohio State is no exception.
Over the last week, the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors and Ohio State’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine issued statements condemning the Trump administration’s sweeping revocation of F-1 visas.
Twelve Ohio State students have had their F-1 visas revoked, per prior Lantern reporting. In addition, two affected students have filed lawsuits against the federal government to challenge the revocations, according to The Columbus Dispatch.
SJP — which is listed as an official plaintiff in one of the aforementioned lawsuits — said it views the visa revocations as part of increasingly severe campaigns of “mass-surveillance, targeting, doxxing, and harassment” against students engaged in pro-Palestinian protests, according to its Instagram page.
In a statement provided to The Lantern, SJP said it believes the university has been passive in the face of the Trump administration’s actions and has not done enough to protect its international students.
“As stated in our public statement posted to our Instagram platform, @SJPOSU, we reject our university’s shameful inaction,” SJP said in a statement. “If the university had genuinely cared for its international students, it would have taken legal action against the blatantly xenophobic attacks waged by the Trump Administration.”
University spokesperson Chris Booker said in a statement the university offered resources to “all affected students.”
“Caring for our students is the university’s highest priority,” Booker said.
SJP said it calls on Ohio State’s faculty, staff and students to demand that the university take action by becoming a sanctuary campus, rejecting any cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The organization also urged Ohio State to make a tangible effort to support students, stand against the government’s threats to remove federal funding and divest from “war profiteers” and “entities complicit in the mass surveillance of Palestinians and oppressed people globally.”
“We demand that the university reallocate tangible resources to support students, supplying them with protection rather than exposing and abandoning them to the violence of the state,” SJP said in the statement.
The university’s chapter of AAUP released a statement April 15 denouncing the visa revocations and committing itself to five action items. These objectives include forming bonds with immigrant rights networks in Columbus, organizing educational training sessions, speaking out at department and university meetings, serving as a go-to resource for international students and preventing ICE from entering classrooms on campus, according to its statement.
Pranav Jani, president of the university’s chapter of AAUP, said the AAUP stands by Ohio State’s international students and rejects the federal government’s recent actions.
“We deplore these visa revocations [and] the intimidation tactics from the federal government against these community members,” said Jani, also an associate professor of English at Ohio State. “And what we want to emphasize is that they are community members. I think sometimes people think, you know, there’s the Buckeye nation, and there’s these outsiders who come in, right? And we want to emphasize, ‘No, the international scholars and students who come in are part of the Buckeye community.’”
Jani said the federal government has deliberately chosen not to explain why many international students’ visas have been revoked, but the AAUP feels certain that some revocations are linked to pro-Palestinian activism.
“Now we know from national instances that, on the one hand, these can be targeted revocations, which have to do with their Palestine activism, because activism around Palestine is being considered by this government to be hostile to it,” Jani said. “They want to suppress it.”
April 15, Ahwar Sultan, a second-year graduate student in comparative studies, filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, alleging his Student and Exchange Visitor Information System — or SEVIS — record was unjustly terminated due to his involvement in campus pro-Palestine demonstrations, per prior Lantern reporting.
However, Jani said not all national cases of revocation involved students engaged in pro-Palestinian activism, leaving the federal government’s reasoning for the revocations unclear.
“So, it could be that, we know at least in one case, that’s true, but we’ve also seen nationally that it could be anything from a traffic violation to some other violation that has nothing to do with their activism or anything like that,” Jani said.
Jill Galvan, an AAUP executive board member, said the AAUP is very concerned with the revocations and how the situation is impacting students’ lives and studies.
“We’re doing all we can to support, both practically and to get people educated, including students themselves knowing their rights because it’s very important to understand all the legal resources that are available as well to fight the situation,” said Galvan, also an associate professor of English at Ohio State.
Galvan said as an organization composed of faculty members, the AAUP is focusing on spreading awareness through the meetings and committees its members are part of.
“These are students, and we have a responsibility as professors to just make sure that students can thrive here and do what they came here to do — international students as much as domestic students,” Galvan said.
Galvan said among Big Ten universities, there is a developing strategy of “collective action” called the “Rutgers Compact,” or the Mutual Defense Academic Compact, that will be the subject of Thursday’s University Senate meeting. The compact — which aims to defend “academic freedom, institutional integrity and the research enterprise” — originated from a March 28 proposal by the Rutgers University Senate, according to a Rutgers University Senate report.
Within this agreement, if the Trump administration targets or cuts funding for a Big Ten school, other universities would offer legal, expert, public relations and advocacy support.
In a Monday interview with The Lantern, university President Ted Carter Jr. said though he understands why the faculty may want to adopt a “harm one, harm all” mindset via the compact, Ohio State already has a number of affiliations and group memberships that “protect and defend our academic freedoms.”
Galvan said she feels such a compact would be extremely beneficial at Ohio State because the university shares the same set of visa-related concerns as most — if not all — schools included in the Big Ten.
“We’re all affected really similarly,” Galvan said. “It’s the same kinds of claims about what’s going on in campus that would deprive [other universities] of federal funding. It’s the same kind of legal situation, it’s the same kind of impact on our students, the same kind of threats to our students.”
