The U.S. is poised to “aggressively” revoke visas issued to an unspecified number of students from China, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday.
The action is expected to intensify the Trump administration’s clash with universities over their international students, a chaotic showdown that has upended campus life, threatened a major stream of university income during a time of deep federal funding cuts and spilled into courtrooms across the country.
Rubio said on X that the revocation will include “those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields,” without elaborating on what areas of study would be targeted or whether the move would apply solely to college students.
He said in a statement that the U.S. State Department and the Department of Homeland Security would “aggressively” revoke the visas, while also revising “visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong.”
The most recent data from the Institute of International Education said that more than 1.1 million foreign students — over half of whom are Chinese or Indian nationals — were in the U.S. for undergraduate, graduate or postgraduation work training programs in 2023-24. The largest share of all international students attended institutions in California, the report said.
In California, Chinese students are the biggest group of international students. The 51,000 Chinese nationals in California make up more than a third of the state’s nearly 141,000 foreign students. At USC alone, there were nearly 6,000 Chinese students as of fall 2024.
USC, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego and UCLA drew the largest numbers of overall international students.
Kevin Lu, who is from Shenzhen, China, and graduated with a finance degree from USC in December, said the statement from Rubio was “really disappointing.”
Lu, who is working for an investment bank in Orange County, is on a visa under “optional practical training,” a work authorization commonly given to international student graduates to gain professional experience.
“After this news, I may postpone any international travel because once I leave the country, I might have a bigger risk of not being able to come back,” Lu said. “I wonder if they revoke enough student visas it will be a hit for the U.S. economy because international students are not only a source of income for universities — we pay more for tuition — but we also offer value to universities and companies.”
The announcement comes as higher education has been roiled by a litany of policy changes related to foreign students. The efforts by the Trump administration have sown fear on campuses nationwide and led some students to depart.
On Tuesday, the State Department stopped scheduling visa interviews with students from foreign countries aiming to relocate their studies stateside, though it said the move was temporary. The department said it was preparing to increase the vetting of prospective international students’ social media activity.
Days earlier, the Trump administration revoked Harvard University’s ability to enroll foreign students. The Massachusetts institution quickly filed a lawsuit over the action and won a temporary stop to the government’s ban.
The fight over foreign students is increasingly playing out in the courts: Last week a California judge issued a nationwide injunction that blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to end the legal status of thousands of international students while a court case challenging the terminations is pending.
S. Jack Hu, who was selected as the incoming UC Riverside chancellor Wednesday and who was born in China, said he had not seen Rubio’s announcement but believed the U.S. remained a “draw for international talents.”
“Those of us who came to study or work … we are contributing to education and economic development and to the country,” said Hu, who secured a visa to study engineering as a graduate student at the University of Michigan in the 1980s.
“If you look at California — many of the newer technology companies and startups — it’s immigrants who contribute a lot to those new technologies and the economy of the country,” said Hu, currently the senior vice president for academic affairs and provost at the University of Georgia. He will start his new position July 15.
