An AI doctoral candidate in California says they had their student visa revoked

An AI doctoral student in California had their SEVIS record — the digital proof of their valid student visa — terminated, putting their immigration status at risk.

Speaking to TechCrunch, the student, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, said they were notified via their college’s international student center that they’d been identified in a criminal records check. The student said that they’d been studying in the U.S. for nearly a decade starting as an undergraduate, and that they have no criminal record.

“The most likely cause may be an interaction with the police many years ago, even before I entered graduate school,” the student said. “I was conducting research in the AI field and had planned to continue my research after graduation.”

Over the past few months, more than a thousand international students in the U.S. have had their visa statuses challenged by the State Department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement as part of an aggressive crackdown orchestrated by the Trump administration. In many cases, colleges haven’t been directly notified by the relevant federal agencies, leaving students with little notice — or recourse.

Yisong Yue, a machine learning professor at Caltech, told TechCrunch the U.S. government’s hardline stance on student visas is “harming the talent pipeline.”

“The cumulative effect is making the U.S. a significantly less appealing destination for many talented researchers,” Yue said. “Because research is highly specialized, when a doctoral student is pulled from a project, it can set back the project by months or years. Beyond the specific students and projects affected, many students on visas are worried.”

Few institutions have been spared by the crackdown. According to reports, students attending Ivy League universities, large public colleges, and small liberal arts schools have had their visas suspended. While the government has accused some of these students of supporting Palestinian militant groups or engaging in “antisemtic” activities, others have been targeted for minor legal infractions, like speeding tickets or other traffic violations.

Some of the revocations appear to be administrative mistakes. Reportedly, one student, Suguru Onda, a computer science doctoral candidate at Brigham Young University, had their revoked student visa reinstated without explanation shortly after their immigration attorney filed suit. The attorney, Adam Crayk, said the government is using AI to screen visa holders without human verification, leading to errors.

Last week, a judge in Georgia issued a temporary restraining order in the case of around 100 international students whose visas were revoked, and directed the government to reinstate the students’ legal status. The ruling only applies to a fraction of students at risk of deportation, however, and could be challenged down the line.

Yue noted that international students contributed to many recent technical breakthroughs in AI. Ashish Vaswani, who moved to the U.S. to study computer science in the early 2000s, is one of the co-creators of the transformer, the seminal AI model architecture that underpins chatbots like ChatGPT. One of the co-founders of OpenAI, Wojciech Zaremba, earned his doctorate in AI from NYU on a student visa.

A recent analysis by the nonprofit educational association NAFSA found that international students at U.S. colleges and universities contributed $43.8 billion to the domestic economy during the 2023-2024 academic year and supported more than 378,000 jobs. 

Yue says that he’s had “multiple conversations” with senior AI researchers who are worried about staying in the United States.

“This includes professors at top universities and researchers at companies such as OpenAI, Google, and so on,” he added. “The cumulative effect of the government’s actions is making the U.S. a significantly less appealing destination for many talented researchers.”