US to Revoke Student Visas for Rule Violations, Embassy Warns

• The US Embassy in India warns students against violating visa terms.
• Over 4,700 international students had their visa records terminated.
• New rules allow visa revocation based on criminal database flags.

The US Embassy in India issued a clear warning to international students to follow the terms of their student visa while studying in the United States.

The advisory stated that if students drop out, stop attending classes, or simply leave their program without informing their university, students could have their student visa revoked and disqualified from applying for any future US visa.

Always follow the terms of your visa and maintain student status so that you do not have any complications, the embassy added. International students across the US in recent weeks have found out that their legal status had been terminated or their student visa had been revoked with little notice.

Additionally, grounds for terminating students' status now include the revocation of their US visas, allowing for the termination of students' status if their names appear in a criminal or fingerprint database in ways that were not permitted previously, according to plaintiffs' attorneys.

The Associated Press put together a review of university statements, communications with school officials, and court documents, and found that at least 1,222 students at 187 colleges, universities, and university systems since late March have had their visas revoked or their legal status terminated.

Also Read: Trump Revokes Harvard’s Authority to Admit Foreign Students

However, the total number of affected students does seem to be considerably higher. At least 4,736 students' visa records were terminated in SEVIS, the database that houses international students' records, which maintains their legal status, according to an April 10 ICE Homeland Security Investigations response to inquiries from Senate and House committees.

The process is somewhat convoluted for students from other countries wishing to come here to study. Students in this category must obtain a visa, and to qualify for these visas, they must demonstrate that they have sufficient financial support to be able to complete the course of study. 

Students are only eligible to obtain a visa from the U.S. government after being admitted to a recognized school and often must first interview at a consulate in another country to obtain an entry visa.

Once in the country, international students typically remain in good standing with their academic program and are generally limited in their off-campus work options. After they graduate, they can then work in the US for 12 months, and 36 months for STEM majors, until they are required to make a more permanent employment visa application.

International student status is kept track of through a system known as SEVIS, or the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System. Typically, a student’s status is terminated in SEVIS when they fail to maintain status in their program, graduate, or transition to a different visa. Terminations until now have been largely at the direction of the schools uploading their usual data updates.

Many Indian students are attracted to American universities. In 2023, US consular teams in India issued over 1,40,000 student visas, more than any other country, a record for the US, for a third consecutive year. In 2023, the US Mission in India processed more than 1.4 million visas.