College newspapers grapple with requests to delete old articles as students and alumni fear deportation

In years past, college newspaper editors often heard from rueful alums who, applying to graduate school or new jobs, wanted articles they’d written as college students taken down.

The student editors generally refused: a core purpose of journalism, after all, is to leave a record.

But these days, the concerns, and the responses to them, are markedly different.

Local student newspaper editors said they are handling a surge of requests to take down or alter published articles, primarily from international students who fear pieces they wrote might attract the attention of ICE and endanger their legal statuses on campus, as President Donald Trump’s administration has revoked more than 1,000 international student visas nationwide.

Student journalists said in interviews they are now grappling with how to keep their fellow college students safe from the federal government while putting out the news.

“I’m a ‘student journalist,’ but these are also my peers,” said Samuel O’Neal, the 23-year-old editor-in-chief of Temple University’s student paper. “The last thing we would want is for someone to get jammed up because they shared something in The Temple News.”

Five current or former Temple students had their visas revoked in recent weeks. O’Neal said the feeling on campus is that “the smallest critique or grievance in a story” might have enormous repercussions for its author.

For that reason, O’Neal said in the past three weeks the paper has removed author names from about nine stories — mainly about Israel and Gaza, but also about more innocuous subjects, like Temple’s past treatment of international students.

The detainment last month of Rumeysa Ozturk, a 30-year-old Turkish Ph.D student at Tufts University, drew attention to views shared in campus newspapers because her lawyer said the only explanation he could think of for her detainment was that she’d cowritten an op-ed for the Tufts paper last year calling on the university to divest from Israel.

At Temple, the university has declined to offer details about the visa revocations, or name the students’ home counties, out of concern for their privacy.

Other Philadelphia-area student papers are responding in similar ways. The Triangle, Drexel’s student paper, has changed some bylines on already published stories to “Triangle staff” to avoid drawing attention to individual authors, the editor-in-chief said.

The Daily Pennsylvanian, the student paper at the University of Pennsylvania, told its student reporters in March to be more lenient with granting anonymity when interviewing international students, and advised noncitizen students to be more careful about what they write. (Diamy Wang, the executive editor, said anonymity is only granted after discussions with student editors.)

» READ MORE: As tensions mounted at UPenn encampment, student journalists stopped sleeping and started writing

Some students feared even describing to The Inquirer how they were responding to the moment because they did not want government officials to use web archives to track down past versions of stories. That response illustrates a level of fear over legally-protected speech that would have recently been unthinkable, said Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel at the Student Press Law Center.

“These are times unlike any that we’ve ever really experienced in the student media world,” said Hiestand, who runs the group’s legal hotline.

Student journalists began reaching out to the SPLC in early March, when ICE agents detained Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident and Columbia University graduate who is not accused of any crime. Khalil was a spokesperson for the pro-Palestinian encampment on Columbia’s campus last spring. Yet calls really spiked after masked immigration authorities arrested Ozturk.

In response, the SPLC and other student media organizations issued new guidance in April, advising student journalists to ease their normal rules when it comes to takedown requests and anonymous sources.

“ICE has weaponized lawful speech and digital footprints and has forced us all to reconsider long-standing journalism norms,” the alert said.

Student newspapers are a training ground for professional journalists, and Hiestand imagines the current climate may alter coverage past this spring.

“They are seeing a government that we have not seen in this country before. It’s definitely going to have a lasting impact on how they cover the world,” he said.

The fraught political moment since Trump began his second term in January has heightened the stakes of what might have been a relaxed extracurricular. Paulie Loscalzo, the editor-in-chief of The Triangle at Drexel and a sports intern at The Inquirer, said lots of students join the paper because they want to explore journalism, or they like writing and they want to be part of a club. It was difficult to reconcile those motivations with the intensity of the job right now.

“‘I want to join this fun club, and also I might get deported’ — That doesn’t really weigh out," Loscalzo, 21, said.

Some student journalists are finding that a chill has settled across campus, so that students are far more reluctant to speak with student press.

Amy Schafer, the 20-year-old editor-in-chief of Penn State’s Daily Collegian, said that the paper recently changed its anonymity policy to allow more students to speak anonymously if they have a valid reason to fear their education might be at risk if they use their names. Student reporters were finding it nearly impossible to get students to speak with them otherwise.

» READ MORE: Penn State removes independent student newspaper copies and racks from campus

Some international student staffers have also asked to write stories without using their names — a rare request for a field in which students are typically trying to build portfolios to help them get jobs after graduation.

Schafer, fearing that stories full of anonymous sources written by anonymous authors would hurt the credibility of the paper, drew the line at anonymous bylines. It was a tricky decision that she is still grappling with.

“I’m still not 100% confident that everything I’m doing is always the right decision,” Schafer said.

Everything she has learned in school — about the First Amendment, about the importance of getting sources on the record, about only granting anonymity in extraordinarily rare circumstances — has not prepared her for a moment quite like this. Like her peers across the country, she is figuring it out in real time.