Oklahoma international students' visas revoked at OSU, UCO
OU Students for Justice in Palestine told OU Daily on Tuesday they are working alongside the Students for Justice in Palestine chapters at Oklahoma State University and University of Central Oklahoma to identify international students who have had their student visas revoked.
The O’Colly, OSU’s student newspaper, reported Tuesday afternoon that eight OSU students had their immigration records terminated by the U.S. government.
The University of Central Oklahoma confirmed to KOCO that four students had their visas revoked.
OU Daily reached out to OU Marketing and Communications Tuesday afternoon to confirm whether any OU international student had their visas revoked. A spokesperson for the university said that due to FERPA protections, they were unable to provide any information regarding the situation.
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act is a federal law that protects the privacy of student education records, granting parents and students access to and control over those records.
OU Daily called Marketing and Communications to understand why OU couldn’t speak, but OSU and UCO could confirm to the media that students were impacted. A spokesperson with Marketing and Communications responded that they could not speak for other universities.
An OU SJP spokesperson told OU Daily they are actively working on releasing a joint statement with OSU SJP and UCO SJP that will state that they are monitoring the situation and how they support students.
The OU SJP spokesperson said they are actively working to try and identify the students at OSU who had their visas revoked, while also working to identify if any OU international students have lost theirs as well.
Schools in the Southeastern Conference who have had visas terminated include the University of Alabama, University of Florida, University of Kentucky, University of Tennessee, Texas A&M and University of Texas.
Visas revoked nationally
The Trump administration has reportedly unexpectedly revoked visas of international students across the country. Schools across the country that have reported having students with a terminated legal status include Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of Michigan, the University of California at Los Angeles and Ohio State University.
On March 4, President Donald Trump wrote in a Truth Social post that any universities allowing “illegal protests” would lose federal funding and any “agitators” would be subject to “imprisonment, deportation and permanent expulsion depending on the crime.”
The Trump administration has targeted students who had been involved with pro-Palestinian activism or speech with a few high-profile detentions of students. On March 8, Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A Palestinian activist, Mahmoud played a prominent role in campus protests against the war in Gaza at Columbia University.
Rumeysa Öztürk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University, was detained by masked agents in plainclothes as she walked to meet friends for dinner. She said she was targeted over an op-ed about Gaza that she wrote in the Tufts Daily, the university’s student newspaper.
On Monday, OU law professor Joseph Thai spoke at an event hosted by the OU Law Students for Palestine and the OU chapter of the American Association of University Professors in the Bell Courtroom of the OU Law Center. There, Thai addressed national concerns regarding free speech rights and protests around college campuses. Thai previously told OU Daily on March 4 that Trump’s assertion of pro-Palestinan protests as “illegal” was “backwards.”
On March 5, OU Daily reached out to OU Marketing and Communications regarding Trump’s statements on Truth Social about protests and how the university would comply. OU Marketing and Communications directed the Daily to the university’s guidelines regarding expressive activity.
This story was edited by Peggy Dodd and Ana Barboza.
