On April 9, UTD told The Retrograde and the Dallas Morning News that 19 students had their immigration status terminated. These 19 students would join over 250 Texas students and one professor who had their visas revoked or immigration status marked as terminated in the Department of Homeland Security’s Student and Exchange Visitor Information System. Instead of sending out guidelines for international students on how they can protect themselves and their communities, President Richard Benson instead sent out a mass email asking everyone to donate more money to UTD. It would not be until April 15 that the International Students and Scholars Office would even bother to send out a message about the situation. The message itself failed to provide any concrete resources for international students to stay informed or protect themselves from also facing a revocation.
This lackluster response appears especially egregious when compared to other schools’ responses to the revocations. UT Arlington president Jennifer Cowley sent out an email to inform her entire campus of the immigration status terminations and the resources the university could provide, as well as transparency into the next steps UTA was going to take to protect its international students and student body as a whole — on the very day the revocations happened. It took UTD six days to do less than what UTA was able to do immediately. UTD has the second-highest percentage of international students across the state of Texas, yet administration has been acting as if the recent visa revocations are a complete blindside they cannot do anything about. This failure to act will almost certainly have consequences while gravely tarnishing the school’s global reputation, and the longer UTD stalls, the more severe the consequences will be.
UTD’s international population is on par with the size of UTA. One in five UTD students are international, while UTA’s proportion is closer to one in six. These are both North Texas institutions that have to deal with the same state and federal regulations, but the leadership at each university has opted for two very different approaches. Even though Cowley’s hands are tied when it comes to how much UT Arlington can do, she made sure to inform the campus in a timely manner while showing that work would be done to protect students as much as possible. UTD can’t even be bothered to respond to its concerned faculty when they write a formal letter to university leadership, asking it to do the bare minimum to protect international students and scholars. This inaction is almost incomprehensible, considering UTD’s push in recent years to beef up its international student enrollment. How does UTD expect to attract global talent — and the income that talent provides — by doing nothing to prepare for a federal administration incredibly hostile to international students? The answer is simple: number-inflating marketing materials are easier to invest in than the wellbeing of students already on campus.
Fear and uncertainty are the words that now dominate discussion among international students. The government has shown a willingness not only to kidnap and deport people for speech it does not agree with, as seen with the public cases of Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Öztürk, but it will also target students seemingly at random. Students at UTD cannot rely on campus administrators to support them during this time of uncertainty, and now they are going to have to look elsewhere if their entire life is upended by sudden DHS action. The material needs of students are urgent, but UTD administration’s inaction demonstrates the school is not willing to treat them with the respect they deserve.
It is striking how many parallels exist between this current situation and how UTD handled May 1: administrative silence making it next to impossible for students to know what is happening, leadership focused more on money than their own students — see: Benson meeting with billionaire Harlan Crow instead of attending to the historic arrests on his own campus — and the use of state violence against students facing no opposition from the university.
For the time being, international students should focus on maintaining a strong community on campus and getting in touch with legal resources in advance. UTD said it will not recommend a course of legal action, but The Retrograde will point out that three Texas students and recent graduates have already been able to successfully get federal judges to temporarily restore their legal status. If needed, international students can sue thanks to the many immigration attorneys in the Dallas area, some of which even provide pro-bono services in severe cases such as these. Now more than ever, it is crucial to know the rights that non-citizens of the U.S. are entitled to, and make sure the people in your community are ready for the worst-case scenario.