The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) calls on students, youth and the working class to mobilize in opposition to the Trump administration’s escalating campaign of terror targeting international students across the country.

In recent weeks, at least 500 international students have had their US visas revoked as part of an intensifying crackdown by the Trump administration on foreign students and universities, according to NAFSA, an international education organization. NAFSA compiled reports from across the country and called the scale of revocations “unprecedented” and “uncharted territory.” 

Inside Higher Ed has separately documented at least 432 revocations as of April 9. The true number is unknown, and is likely in the thousands. Inside Higher Ed also reports that ICE has deleted hundreds of international students’ records from the SEVIS database, without notice or explanation. This is an attempt to erase legal documentation and facilitate deportations without due process.

Specific cases include:

• University of Michigan: 22 students and graduates had their visas or legal residency revoked; one left the country following advice from school officials.

• Wayne State University: Four students’ records were deleted.

• Minnesota State University: Five visa revocations.

• University of California, California State University systems, and Stanford: At least 83 students affected.

• Texas A&M: 15 students’ visas were revoked, and another two at the University of Texas Austin.

• University of Florida: One student detained by ICE for driving with expired documentation and sent to a detention center.

• Tufts University: A second student was detained before the university even received notice of a visa status change.

• North Carolina State University: Two Saudi students left the US after their legal status was terminated.

• University North Carolina-Chapel Hill: Six students’ visas were revoked.

These actions are being carried out without due process, creating widespread confusion and fear on campuses across the country. Many of the visa cancellations have occurred under the AI-driven “Catch and Revoke” program, which monitors students’ political activity online and flags them for deportation. 

Some students are being deported for minor violations long since adjudicated. Others have no violations at all. Many revocations are being justified under a 1990 clause in the Immigration and Nationality Act, previously used only 15 times out of 11.7 million visa cases. It allows the Secretary of State to revoke a visa if the student presents “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”

Translated into plain English, this means the student might oppose the US government’s imperialist wars. Washington is carrying out a massive military buildup across the Middle East as it prepares for war against Iran, which Trump has threatened to bomb. The US is also engaged in a proxy war against Yemen and is aiding the Israeli regime in its ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Those explicitly targeted for opposing the Gaza genocide include Columbia graduate student and permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil, who was abducted more than a month ago; Tufts graduate Rumeysa Ozturk, seized by masked agents for writing an op-ed criticizing Israel; and Cornell PhD student Momodou Taal, who has been forced to flee the country after challenging Trump’s unconstitutional executive orders.

Student newspapers at Tufts, Columbia, Stanford and other schools are also reporting a surge in requests from student journalists for anonymity, and even retroactive removal of bylines, out of fear their political writings will be used as a pretext for arrest and deportation.

The scope and character of this repression are without precedent in modern American history. The only historical parallels are the actions of Nazi Germany and the CIA-backed military dictatorships of postwar Latin America. And it is not limited to the United States. Similar authoritarian measures are being carried out by other imperialist powers: Germany is moving to deport four pro-Palestinian activists, and the UK revoked a student visa last year on similar political grounds. In Australia, the government has moved to reduce student visas by 80,000.

This is unfolding amid a fascistic offensive against immigrants and refugees. The far-right Supreme Court has now greenlighted Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to carry out mass deportations—establishing a precedent, as one dissenting justice warned, that could be used against American citizens.

This campaign will not be limited to international students. It will be expanded to all students, and to the entire working class, unless it is stopped. Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that Trump is serious about deporting American citizens, with Trump himself boasting that he would be “honored” to deport US citizens to prisons in El Salvador.

The Democratic Party is fully complicit in the assault on international students and the broader campaign of political repression. The persecution of students began under the Biden administration, which slandered opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza as “anti-Semitic”—used to justify the police repression of protests and now deportation.

University administrators, closely tied to the Democratic Party, have enforced this witch-hunt on campuses. They have done nothing to protect immigrant students and have responded to Trump’s moves to cut off federal funding by agreeing to measures that severely restrict free speech on campus.

The same Democratic Party helped launch the international campaign against student anti-war activists with its support for the imprisonment of Ukrainian socialist Bogdan Syrotiuk, who has now been held for nearly a year by the Zelensky regime. Bogdan’s only “crime” was to speak out against the US-NATO proxy war in Ukraine. 

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, have maintained a cowardly silence in the face of the attack on international students. They support the imperialist war drive and the apparatus of repression needed to enforce it at home. Ocasio-Cortez has championed Jared Golden, a CIA Democrat and warmonger, as the future of the Democratic Party, and funneled over $160,000 into the campaigns of CIA operatives and pro-war Democrats. 

Sanders has openly praised Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, saying Trump “did right” by cracking down on immigration. He has backed virtually every imperialist war over the past three decades, including the bombing of Yugoslavia, the invasion of Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the drone assassination program under Obama, the war in Syria and the current war in Ukraine. 

Sanders has also aligned himself with UAW President Shawn Fain, who has enthusiastically embraced Trump’s trade war policies and called for converting auto plants to war production. Fain and the entire UAW apparatus have refused to defend their own members—including Khalil, who was part of the SWC-UAW at Columbia, and other UAW graduate student workers now targeted for deportation. The same is true of the United Electrical Workers, of which Taal was a member. The union bureaucracy, no less than the Democratic Party, is pro-war and functions as a critical mechanism for suppressing opposition within the working class and youth.

Democratic rights cannot be defended by appealing to the Democratic Party—a party of Wall Street, war and political reaction. The various pseudo-left organizations that orbit the Democrats are laying political traps for students and workers, seeking to channel opposition back into the very forces responsible for the crisis.

The International Youth and Students for Social Equality calls on students, youth and the working class to mobilize to stop the deportations of international students. Those imprisoned by the ICE gestapo must be freed immediately.

The April 5 protests, involving millions across the US and around the world, revealed the mass opposition to the Trump administration that is developing internationally. But this opposition must now be armed with a clear political perspective.

The IYSSE calls for the broadest possible resistance to this assault on democratic rights. But this fight cannot be waged on the campuses alone. It requires the political mobilization of the working class—the vast majority of the population—as an independent force, against both capitalist parties, and on the basis of a socialist program.

The turn of the capitalist oligarchy to dictatorship is inseparable from its war on the working class, expressed in the slashing of social programs, the mass firing of federal workers, the elimination of basic regulatory protections, and the escalation of war and repression to enforce the interests of the financial elite.

This is a struggle between socialism and barbarism. Trump is not an aberration but the expression of a capitalist system in terminal crisis, one that sees no way out except through mass repression, social counterrevolution and world war. His administration is filled with billionaires like Elon Musk—representatives of a ruling class whose ignorance, arrogance and hatred of the working class are the true face of American capitalism.

If the symptoms of this disease—the destruction of democratic rights, social inequality, environmental collapse, pandemics and imperialist war—are to be stopped, the disease itself must be eradicated. That disease is capitalism.

We call on all students and young people to join the IYSSE, the student and youth movement of the Socialist Equality Party, to take up the fight to build a socialist and internationalist movement of the working class in the US and around the world.