Three Penn students have had their immigration statuses terminated

Three students at the University of Pennsylvania have had their permission to study in the country revoked, the school said Monday morning.

Penn said none of the visa revocations appear to be related to student protest activity, for which President Donald Trump’s administration has been targeting international students on other college campuses.

The terminations appear to be in relation to “immigration status violations,” Penn officials said in an email sent to international students and scholars. The students on Penn-sponsored student visas had their immigration status “deactivated in the federal Student and Exchange Visitor Information System,” Penn said. Notifications were sent from the Department of Homeland Security, the school said.

The Ivy League university said it’s also aware of “reports of encounters with ICE agents at Penn and additional visa revocations” but did not provide any details. Immigration Customs and Enforcement agents have not been on campus in connection with the three student visa revocations, university officials said.

“We want to reassure the community that we are monitoring and investigating all reports and providing appropriate support to people when these incidents arise,” wrote Ezekiel J. Emanuel, vice provost for global initiatives, and Karu Kozuma, vice provost for university life. “This is an extremely unsettling time for international students and scholars at Penn and in the United States.”

Penn did not say if the students are fighting the revocations or are returning to their home countries and provided no details about the students, including their countries of origin.

Typically, even if a student’s entry visa is revoked, it would not impact their current legal status in the United States, said Emily Cohen, a Philadelphia partner at the immigration law firm Green and Spiegel.

But, Cohen said, it appears that ICE is now drawing on law enforcement databases to find people who have been arrested or fingerprinted in the past — even if they have not been convicted of a crime — and then terminating their statuses in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, a step beyond revoking their student visas.

Such students are now listed as being in the United States illegally, and could be detained and put in deportation proceedings. ICE does not have the legal authority to terminate their legal statuses in that way, Cohen said.

“They’ve been maintaining their status, they’ve been going to school full time, they haven’t been working without authorization, they’ve been doing everything they should be doing,” Cohen said. “These students have done nothing wrong.”

Many of her clients are panicked, Cohen said, and unsure how to fix their legal standing when they did nothing to jeopardize it in the first place.

“That is what our main concern is: the students who have done nothing wrong to violate their status — they might be detained,” she said.

Her office, she said, is evaluating each case and some students are joining class action lawsuits over the unlawful terminations. Asked whether she represents students at Penn, Cohen said she represents students at universities throughout the country, including in Philadelphia.

» READ MORE: Temple student whose visa was revoked has self-deported, university says

The visa revocations did not seem to be impacting students involved in the pro-Palestinian encampment erected at Penn last spring, according to an activist who was involved in last year’s protests at Penn. The activist, who asked not to be named because of concerns about retribution, feared it was only a matter of time, though.

Students are concerned that the university’s email seemed to confirm the presence of ICE on campus, the activist said.

“Terrified, like everyone else,” Harun Küçük, an associate professor and former director of the university’s Middle East Center, said in reaction to the student visa revocations.

But he was not surprised.

“It’s happening everywhere,” he said. “It was bound to happen here, too.”

The university did not immediately respond to requests for additional information. ICE also did not respond to requests for comment.

The actions at Penn mark the second incident locally of immigration status revocation. Temple University last week said that a student had chosen to self-deport after the student’s visa was revoked.

It comes as Trump’s administration has made efforts to deport students who have been involved in pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, as well as for other reasons. A University of Minnesota student recently had his visa pulled because of a drunken driving infraction, according to news reports.

Nationwide, at least 147 students have had their visas revoked and could now face detainment and deportation, according to The New York Times.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last month that he had revoked about 300 visas of students, visitors, and others for their views on foreign policies and their actions, including protesting.

The Trump administration has already conducted high-profile moves to deport students from Columbia and Tufts Universities. The Tufts student, who was from Turkey, was surrounded by officers on a sidewalk and swept away. A doctoral student at Cornell University, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University, and a Harvard University researcher are among others who faced actions, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Times of India last week reported that hundreds of international students in the United States got an email from the Department of State directing them to self-deport because of their involvement in campus activism.

Penn has 6,903 international students enrolled at the university, which has a total full-time student population, both undergraduate and graduate, of 24,219.

The university’s International Student and Scholar Services office last week started a website with information for students on steps to take if their visas are revoked. It can only be viewed by Penn community members.

“A terminated SEVIS record means you are out of status and can’t legally study, work, or remain in the U.S.,” the website said, according to the Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn’s student newspaper. “Depending on the circumstances, you may begin to accumulate unlawful presence from the date of termination.”

A revocation means that a person’s F-1 or J-1 immigration record is no longer active, the website says, according to the DP. That “usually happens when a student is out of compliance with U.S. immigration rules.”

Staff writer Jeff Gammage contributed to this article.