Peter Thomas, who oversees international education at Campbellsville University, got the text at 6:19 in the morning.
“Check your records.” It was from a colleague at the University of Louisville.
So before sunrise on Friday, April 25, Thomas rushed to his computer and logged in to the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or SEVIS, a government immigration database that records the visa status of international students in the United States. He scanned the list of names at Campbellsville, a Baptist school in central Kentucky.
Weeks earlier, authorities had “terminated” more than ten of his international students from the system with little explanation, ending their ability to study or remain in the country legally.
Friday morning, Thomas saw that at least three had been returned to active status. Over the course of the day, more names flipped back to legal standing, as if coming back from a sort of academic death. “Everybody’s being made whole,” Thomas thought at the time, though it was not quite so simple.
Campbellsville is one of more than 290 colleges and universities that have been swept up in the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration, with thousands of international students unexpectedly losing their visa status, only to see it resurrected in the past week.
At least eight evangelical schools have reported student records being deleted from SEVIS: Oklahoma Christian University lost two; Baylor University, three; Concordia University Wisconsin, ten. More than 60 students at evangelical institutions have been impacted, according to data from the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU), though many small private colleges did not disclose their cancellations.
The disappearances began in March as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) embarked on a series of high-profile arrests of international students—some for expressing pro-Palestine views on campus and some for reasons unknown. At the same time, it began quietly canceling the legal status of at least 1,800 students. In some cases, the government now says, it was not revoking visas; it was only deleting the digital link between the students’ visas and their schools. The move erased student authorizations to study, effectively forcing them to stop and to consider leaving the country.
The deletions, however, seemed to have nothing to do with political activism. In some cases, students had previously committed crimes such as underage drinking. In others, they may have had minor traffic violations that had been dismissed. In many instances, the government offered no reasoning for the terminations. A federal judge called them “arbitrary and capricious.”
In court hearings this week, the government revealed that it had combed an FBI database for thousands of international student names without thoroughly vetting them. At Campbellsville, where roughly 30 percent of the student body comes from abroad, one student appeared to have had his SEVIS record terminated because he filed a police report after being robbed, according to Thomas. “It just doesn’t make sense,” he said.
In the ensuing chaos, affected students filed dozens of lawsuits to preserve their status—including a group of recent Indian graduates of Concordia University, St. Paul, whose terminations forced them to abandon internships at IT companies.
After a month, the mounting pile of court injunctions made the government to blink: On April 25, the same morning Thomas was watching his students’ academic careers being returned to rights, a Justice Department lawyer in Washington, DC, explained to a federal judge that DHS was working on a new system for reviewing international students; it would reinstate deleted records until the work was finished.
“There was a sigh of relief,” CCCU president David Hoag told CT. “That sent a signal that maybe the government was still working through the process, and then they realized, wow, maybe they didn’t have everything together and they’re going to have to modify their approach on the issue.”
But Hoag said the sense of relief is temporary. The administration has warned that it may still terminate the status of students it has reinstated and that it may still target students for deportation. And not all students have been restored.
“Records are getting corrected, but not consistently,” Thomas said. Reversing the terminations is a tedious process for both the government and schools, and for some students, administrators must manually request corrections to the database.
That adds one more burden for Christian schools that do not have dedicated staff members watching SEVIS records and managing international students, Hoag said. Sudden changes may get overlooked and remedies delayed, especially as schools juggle end-of-semester grading and graduations.
The visa-status whiplash has upended life for many students. Some have reported leaving the country or going into hiding to avoid deportation. Others sat out classes during the busiest stretch of the academic year. One student at Campbellsville, a woman from a farming community in rural India, said her family took out a $3,000 loan to hire a lawyer to fight her termination.
“It was very painful for her,” said Thomas, who is proud of his school’s large international student population. He’s grateful that the terminations have stopped for now. But “there’s some harm that won’t be reversed. I sure hope that things can get better.”
The campaign against international students comes at a time of record-high international enrollments at US colleges and universities. Foreign students are a significant source of revenue for many small schools, in particular. Colleges worry that the government actions could keep those students away, as it did during the first Trump administration.
“We may have a blip on the screen on our international enrollments this next year,” Hoag said. “With all these changes, the US doesn’t look as friendly.”
Even on campuses where no one lost visa status, the uncertainty has left students and staff on edge. Multiple colleges and seminaries declined to comment for this story and asked that their international students not be interviewed. One university president told CT his school had not been impacted at all, then requested nonetheless that his school not be named.
No SEVIS records have been terminated at Asbury Theological Seminary, which enrolls roughly 80 international students at its campus in Wilmore, Kentucky, an hour and half from Campbellsville. But registrar Allan Varghese still checks the database nearly every day.
A couple of weeks ago, someone stopped Varghese in the dining hall and said, “I heard ICE is talking with somebody.” A faculty member also emailed Varghese, mentioning that ICE was questioning someone. Did Varghese know who? Varghese went straight to the database, confirmed that no students were missing, and told everyone it was probably just a rumor.
At least twice, he said, his international students received phone calls from scammers warning that they had violated the terms of their visas and offering to help resolve their immigration cases. Varghese reassured them with a little gallows humor. “If ICE needs to find somebody,” he joked, “they’ll come to your door.”
Still, the registrar, a native of India, said many of the seminary’s international students are unshaken by the administration’s antagonism toward immigrants. Some are doctoral students, further along in their careers. Some overcame impossible bureaucratic and financial hurdles to study in America. Some come from countries where Christians live under authoritarian governments; they feel they know how to avoid the scrutiny of strongman leaders.
“They are used to that kind of rhetoric,” Varghese said. “Some of them didn’t think this would happen here. But at the same time, they were like, ‘What do you expect?’”
Varghese meets regularly with international students, praying and putting on workshops to help them navigate the struggles of studying in a foreign land. He encourages them with the story of Ruth, the Moabite widow and immigrant. “Just to remind everybody that ultimately God is who brought you here, and for a reason and a task, and let’s not forget that,” he said.
Then Varghese interrupted himself. “We are not going to put that out as an official email or anything.” The wrong person could take even the mention of a biblical heroine and somehow use it against you, he said.
“That’s the risky part of these things.”
Andy Olsen is senior features writer at Christianity Today.
