The Trump administration is escalating its campaign against international students at U.S. colleges and universities, announcing that it will begin “aggressively” revoking the visas of Chinese students, in addition to freezing visa processing for all foreign-born students as it prepares to require additional social media vetting for every applicant. “It’s really just difficult for me to think of any conceivable theory on which this is going to help the United States,” says Jameel Jaffer, noting that international students pay a disproportionate share of tuition costs on U.S. campuses. Jaffer is the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, which has previously sued the government over its social media vetting policy for visa applications. The policy, which began as a pilot program during the Obama administration, “is ineffective at identifying national security threats, but it is very effective at chilling free speech,” says Jaffer.

Jaffer also comments on the high-profile immigration detention of former Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil and Harvard graduate researcher Kseniia Petrova, as well as a case brought by the Knight Institute challenging the constitutionality of the Trump administration’s crackdown on campus pro-Palestine protest.

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