Trump Administration Slashes Visa Lengths for Students, Journalists

The Trump administration has finalized immigration rules shortening several forms of visas for foreign visitors and residents in the U.S., with particular emphasis on students and the press.

The rule changes, announced last week by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), end the “duration of status” system, which had allowed foreign visitors on certain visas to remain in the country, without the need for repeated application renewals, if they continued to meet eligibility rules.

DHS characterized the duration of status rule as a “loophole,” despite the long practice of its use. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin further derided duration of status as “compromis[ing] national security and created an environment ripe for immigration fraud.”

Nonimmigrant foreign students on F visas and foreign exchange students on J Visas would be affected by the rule change affecting academics. Formerly, foreign students were allowed to remain in the U.S. for the duration of their studies. The new rule, however, imposes periodic reevaluations of their visa status.

The rule also limits a two-month “grace period” after students in colleges or universities graduate, which allows them time to reapply for new visas or decide whether they want to return to their home country. Under the new rule, that time frame is reduced to just 30 days.

“It is a solution in search of a problem,” Fanta Aw, the executive director and CEO of NAFSA: Association of International Educators, said to Newsweek regarding the rule changes. “International students and exchange visitors are already the most monitored nonimmigrant populations in the United States.”

Even the libertarian Cato Institute panned the altered rules.

“International students, ​many of whom will have spent ​years in the USA, will now ⁠have just 30 days to find an employer to sponsor them or immediately be turned into illegal immigrants. Have these people no understanding of how life works?” asked David J. Bier, immigration studies director at Cato.

The new rules will not take full effect until September, meaning student groups or universities and colleges have some time to potentially challenge them.

DHS’s new rules also target foreign journalists, reducing the duration of their visas from five years to just 240 days. For foreign journalists from China, the rule reduces their visa duration to 90 days.

Critics lambasted the changes as an attack on press freedoms and the rights of journalists.

“This change destroys international journalists’ ability to report from the U.S. and makes it extremely difficult for international outlets to operate here at all,” said Ben Grazda, advocacy manager for Reporters Without Borders. “Not only does this impose unnecessary personal, legal, and financial burdens on journalists and their outlets, but it also represents yet another sanction on the press by the Trump administration and the unaccountable Department of Homeland Security.”

Jose Zamora, regional director for the Americas for the Committee to Protect Journalists, called the move “the behavior of a backsliding democracy, not the international vanguard of free speech.”

Zamora added:

Under these restrictions, the Trump administration has moved to — yet again — deny access based on its individual policing of a journalist’s reporting. This is the latest escalation CPJ has documented following a pattern of deeply concerning press freedom violations from this administration.

The U.S. State Department also announced a new restriction policy that would target so-called “far left terrorist and aligned groups” seeking entry into the U.S. Per a statement from State Secretary Marco Rubio, the department claimed that leftist groups are employing “a strategy that explicitly aims to undermine the political foundations of free and self-governing societies.”

Rubio cited a national security directive, issued by Trump last year, that focuses on individuals and groups espousing vague “anti-Christian” and “anti-American” views. That memo is incredibly vague, so much so that it could allow the administration to potentially label anyone espousing leftist views of any kind as terroristic.

In issuing that directive and other subsequent actions, the administration has ignored the very real threat of right-wing violence, putting its entire focus on perceived threats (whether real or imagined) from the left.