Another MAGA wall goes up, this one around UW and other colleges

When a Chinese doctoral student at the University of Washington challenged the U.S. government in court the other day, asking why his legal status had been suddenly revoked, the answer was striking for its banality.

“I think ICE’s position, Your Honor, is that they have the general ability to establish and maintain that database, and that as part of that general maintenance of the database, they can make changes to it,” the U.S. attorney said.

So: Because they feel like it. Because they can.

ICE is Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and it has now deleted legal status to be in the country for 23 UW students — during the middle of a school term, with no reasons given. In the case Thursday, the judge noted the casual indifference of it all.

“It does not appear … that the government has followed its own regulations,” he said before issuing an order that this one student get his legal status back and not be deported.

I’m going to go out on a sturdy limb and predict the government didn’t follow its own regulations in most, if not all, of the other 22 UW cases, either. Or with the 1,500-plus international college students who have had their legal statuses abruptly deleted around the country.

It’s a classic Trump dish. Malevolence mixed with incompetence. Plus a dash of “We don’t really care, do you?”

These students are not here illegally; we invited them to come to our country. America has the top university system in the world, and more than 1.1 million eager international students flock here. More than 23,000 attend Washington colleges.

It’s a cultural exchange and an economic boon. We sell more American higher education to the other nations of the world — $56 billion annually — than we do coal and natural gas combined, The Washington Post noted.

That’s all now at risk.

“Even without ICE’s horrible abuses, a pattern of arbitrarily revoking student visas makes the U.S. no longer a viable schooling option for international students,” said one UW professor, Carl Bergstrom, who teaches biology.

There’s already evidence that international students may be doing a Canada on us — sizing up the hate and the chaos and saying “no thanks.”

In a court brief filed last week in a related case, the states of Massachusetts and Washington said “a number of public colleges and universities in (our) states are already experiencing significant declines in enrollment interest from international students.” The brief did not cite specific schools. The University of Washington, though, is especially vulnerable because it ranks in the top 20 for international enrollment with about 8,000. That makes up 15% of all undergrad and grad programs.

What often goes unsaid is those students have in the past paid 30% or more of the total tuition. Foreign students tend to pay full price, and don’t qualify for financial aid. Full tuition is $43,200 this year at the UW, compared with $12,900 for in-state students.

You can do the math. If even a fraction of foreign UW students — say, 1,000 — decide America is too crazy or unstable right now, that’s a $40 million hit to our flagship university. This when the state Legislature has already proposed slashing UW’s budget by about $70 million.

Theoretically more slots could open up to in-state students. But either the school would get a lot pricier, or taxes would have to go up.

In-state students are “heavily subsidized by tuition dollars from international students,” Bergstrom wrote on social media. “By eliminating this resource stream, the (Trump) administration furthers their stated mission of destroying higher education.”

Overstated? Here’s how Forbes magazine put it: “Suddenly colleges with big foreign student populations face existential risk.”

This past week, the Department of Homeland Security, home to ICE, ramped up the existentialism by threatening to cancel the visas of all 10,000 international students who go to Harvard.

There’s an ideological drive to this. The Trump administration is sifting through social media accounts of students, searching for posts that display “a hostile attitude toward U.S. citizens or U.S. culture (including government, institutions, or founding principles).” It’ll use what it finds to cancel visas.

Ironically, there may be no social media account in America that fits that profile more than Trump’s own. But I digress.

The chilling effect is real. At Seattle University, the campus newspaper reports that students with visas are so scared that the paper is having difficulty getting any to agree to be interviewed. Seattle U has about 850 international students out of 6,500.

“Who would want to express their views if it could uproot their entire life?” a Spectator editorial said. “It is becoming nearly impossible to tell the full story.”

UW advised international students to carry their immigration documents at all times, even while going to class. It’s in case ICE starts up with a “papers, please” campaign.

How did we get this insecure and rattled by the outside world? It’s true immigration enforcement got too lax under the Biden administration. I argued in this space, for instance, that King County went way too far in barring ICE flights from Boeing Field. The reason I took that position is that if a noncitizen commits a serious or violent crime, they should be shown the door.

But these are students. The Chinese doctoral candidate mentioned above has a 3.8 GPA and was netted in ICE’s visa sweep because he had been stopped, though not convicted, for suspected driving under the influence. As the judge said, that wouldn’t be grounds for sending him out of the country even if he had been convicted.

Incredibly one Japanese student at Brigham Young University had his legal status stripped because of a fishing violation. His attorney said ICE appears to be using AI to dragnet the students.

Good grief, the president himself has been convicted of multiple felonies! You’d think the Trump administration, out of all actors, might be a bit more understanding of the slings and arrows of the justice system. Or at least the part about innocent until proven guilty.

What’s happening to the universities right now is more MAGA wall-building — and at its worst. In just three months, Trump has constructed a wall of insults against Canada, a wall of blanket tariffs against free trade, and now a wall of suspicion against global academic exchange.

This is the problem with seeking to be a closed society, rather than one more open to the world. Walls can’t distinguish between good and bad. Walls have no judgment, no humanity. Walls are stupid.

Due to a surge in comments violating our Commenting Code of Conduct, we’ll be closing comments on Danny Westneat’s weekend column at noon on Sundays.