Trump Admin Eyes Ban on Foreign Students at ‘Pro-Hamas’ Universities

‘You can have so many bad apples in one place that it leads to decertification of the school,’ senior administration official says

The Trump administration is weighing a plan to bar universities from enrolling foreign students if too many of the students are “pro-Hamas,” senior officials told Axios.

“Every institution that has foreign students … will go through some sort of review,” an official said. “You can have so many bad apples in one place that it leads to decertification of the school. … I don’t think we’re at that point yet. But it is not an empty threat.”

Universities will also likely receive subpoenas in which they will have to provide “any information that they know about students who have actively participated in violent protests,” a Justice Department official told Axios.

The warning comes after Secretary of State Marco Rubio earlier this month launched the “Catch and Revoke” initiative, using AI tools to identify foreign nationals who voice support for Hamas or other designated terror groups and then revoke their student visas.

More than 300 foreign students have had their visas revoked since the “Catch and Revoke” initiative launched, an official told Axios. The United States has around 1.5 million student visa-holders as part of the Student and Exchange Visitor Program.

The Trump administration has targeted a slew of universities, including Columbia University, UCLA, Harvard University, and the University of Pennsylvania, for failing to curb anti-Semitism on campus. Columbia has received the brunt of the crackdown, with the federal government revoking more than $430 million in grants and contracts to the Ivy League school.

While Columbia has publicly pledged to comply with administration demands to rein in anti-Semitic campus protests, interim president Katrina Armstrong during a faculty meeting on Saturday downplayed the changes, the Washington Free Beacon reported. Armstrong said the school has made “no changes” to its rules regarding masked protests—even though she had announced in a public letter just a day earlier that the school would no longer permit protesters to wear masks to conceal their identities.

President Donald Trump in late January signed an executive order directing federal agencies to look into deporting anti-Semitic resident aliens, including student visa-holders, who break U.S. law.

“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: Come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” reads a White House fact sheet following the order. Trump promised to “cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before,” according to the fact sheet.