Isha’s brother took his own life last year.
He was her only sibling. She could not return to her home country to attend his funeral or comfort their parents. She could not give Street Roots her real first name.
“I’m still grieving,” Isha said. “‘Still’ is an understatement. This grief will never go away. I will grieve forever. Yet I couldn’t go home. I couldn’t go home because of fear. I would be going home at the cost of a career I have so passionately aspired toward and devoted my entire life to pursuing.”
Isha is an international student working on an advanced degree at an American university. She would rather not say which one or exactly what she is studying. Because of President Donald Trump’s hostility toward international students, she wants to keep her head down.
She worries that attracting the attention of the administration might lead to her being detained or deported, possibly after being abducted off the street by masked federal agents wearing electric shock gloves.
All she wants is an education, Isha told Street Roots.
“It’s really hard to live through this time,” she said, breaking into tears. “What did I do to deserve this? What did I do to not deserve to be with my family at my brother’s funeral?”
‘International students bring a wealth of talent’
Many international students live in similar fear, and perhaps playing into the administration’s hands, fewer of them are coming to the United States.
According to the Common App, an online platform for students applying for college, first-year international applicants fell by 10% for the 2025-26 academic year, driven by steep declines in parts of Asia.
International students make up approximately 5.7% of Oregon State University’s student body.
Rob Odom, the vice president of university relations and marketing at OSU, told Street Roots his university supports approximately 1,943 international students and their families from more than 100 countries — down from approximately 2,400 in previous years.
Such declines could be as alarming to the colleges and universities themselves as it is to the students.
The Association of International Educators reports that international students contributed $42.9 billion to the U.S. economy and supported more than 355,000 American jobs during the 2024-25 school year.
This translates to a rough average of $16.5 million per campus annually across America’s four-year institutions, according to the institution’s figures.
Domestic students are not as lucrative. According to the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, more than 80% of international students pay all of their tuition and fees. They usually receive nothing in financial aid or federal loans. Approximately 72% of their funding comes entirely from their families or foreign scholarships.
They also pay out-of-state tuition — bringing in two or three times as much revenue as in-state students while also being subject to mandatory international student fees.
“International students pay non-resident tuition, and this helps offset the tuition costs that Oregonians bear, but they bring so much more — including different cultures, different perspectives, food, music and the arts,” Odom said.
Many graduate-level international students work as teaching or research assistants, driving critical science and engineering projects at lower costs for institutions.
For instance, at Oregon State University, international students in the Department of Crop and Soil Science support field experiments, lab work and data analysis that benefit Oregon agriculture well beyond the Corvallis campus.
They also bring diverse knowledge of international crop science, climate adaptations and pest management.
“International students bring a wealth of talent and a connection to the world that we would not otherwise have,” Odom said.
‘There does not appear to be a single cause’
For all the benefits of having international students study in the United States, there is one big problem. Trump doesn’t like them. He bullied his way into power with a long list of targets and false claims. Much of his abuse is directed at people from other countries.
His Department of Homeland Security reports that more than 8,000 student visas have been cancelled since Trump began his second term last year.
Administration officials argue this is necessary because too many students overstay their visas. That’s not true — even by the administration’s own reckoning.
The Department of Homeland Security issued a 2017 report that concluded students overstay their visas more often than other visitors. However, the report added that 99% of students leave on time.
Yet Trump keeps attacking international students regardless of the facts.
He falsely claimed in a social media post in April last year that universities accept students “from all over the world that want to rip our country apart.” He also claimed 31% of the students at Harvard University come from other countries. The number is 23%, on par with peer schools.
“We have people (who) want to go to Harvard and other schools, (but) they can’t get in because we have foreign students there,” Trump said in May last year.
That’s not how university admissions work.
University officials evaluate applicants based on overall institutional goals and qualifications rather than admitting international students at the expense of domestic students.
Trump nonetheless demanded a list of the names of Harvard’s international students and their countries of origin, starting with the assumption that “many will be bad.”
Harvard gets singled out, but the administration has also imposed harsher (and constantly changing) restrictions on international students throughout higher education and threatening to cut federal resources for institutions that fail to nod in agreement.
President Joe Biden spent his tenure rolling back the restrictive proposals from Trump’s first term — maintaining stable, open frameworks to encourage international students.
Now everything is in flux. Universities, including Oregon’s seven universities and 17 community colleges, were informed in early August that student visas are now capped at four years, regardless of how long students’ academic programs take. Obviously, doctoral and medical programs often exceed this limit.
Students who need more time must pay to request extensions. This means going through the vetting process again with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, including being fingerprinted and photographed again while going through another round of background and security checks.
The new rule goes into effect Sept. 15 — approximately a week before fall-term classes begin. Officials at several American campuses have advised their international students spending their summers abroad to return to the United States before the new rule kicks in.
Immigration statuses, grace periods and re-entry conditions remain subject to constant change.
Students used to have 60 days after graduation to leave the country or transfer to another federally approved Student and Exchange Visitor Program. Now they have 30 days.
Transferring is tough. Students face strict limits on changing majors or transferring schools, including a ban on changes during their first year.
Odom stopped short of blaming the Trump administration directly for the decline in international students at Oregon State.
“There does not appear to be a single cause for this decline,” he said. “Several factors are likely contributing, including visa appointment disruptions, processing delays, travel restrictions affecting some countries, uncertainty about immigration pathways after graduation, rising cost sensitivity and strong competition from other countries that may be viewed as more affordable or predictable.”
However, Odom and other university officials seemed skittish to talk about international students in general and the Trump administration in particular. All attempts to reach individuals at Oregon’s universities were routed to the institution’s public relations departments.
“We are not connecting media with students, and the university is not doing interviews on this topic due to privacy concerns,” Odom said in an email Aug. 13. He agreed to answer general questions in writing.
‘We know there are targets on our backs’
Thea (yet another pseudonym), the director of communications and marketing at a private university in California, told Street Roots she understands her colleagues’ apprehensions.
University officials often use the line “don’t make the trigger bigger” as they worry about keeping their grants and federally funded programs, she said.
Some of those resources have so far avoided Trump’s intimidation attempts. Thea said universities want to keep it that way.
“That line of thinking has sometimes seemed like the better choice, the lesser of two evils,” Thea said. “It lets us mask, so to speak, to keep running.”
Universities don’t want to put anything in writing or on the record, not only with the media but within their own institutions, she added — especially if it appears to support “the resistance.”
“This stuff is communicated unofficially via in-person conversations because no one wants things to be in writing or recorded/shared,” Thea said. “The feeling is we all know there are targets on our backs, so let’s not do things to become bigger and more visible targets. I’m not saying I agree with this mindset, just articulating what it is.”
Thea said part of what’s tragic about the government’s stance is that international students are “nothing but a blessing to the institutions they attend.”
“There is no real drawback to having international students on a campus,” Thea said. “Having international students at a university is a way to bolster enrollment and boost diversity and often contributes to additional research capacity — particularly if they’re recruited from countries whose populations go into the sciences at higher than the typical rates of U.S. students.”
‘I have to be the ideal minority’
Isha said she suspects university officials are as scared as students. Officials risk their institutions losing federal resources if anything said publicly puts them on the White House’s radar, she added.
“Everything is affected here today,” she said. “There’s a lot of hyper self-vigilance going on in the minds of international students. They are extremely aware of achieving this idea of excellence in every aspect of life.”
Isha said she feels intense pressure to be the “ideal minority.”
“You are driving 70 mph in a 65-mph zone, and you remember a citizen can afford to get a ticket,” she said. “I can’t afford to do that. I have to be the ideal minority for me to have the acceptance of the people of this land. It’s very hard to constantly be in that space of fear, so international students are always looking for places where they can feel safe and for people who truly care and will listen.”
Isha’s visa expired Aug. 3. She applied for her renewal in February. It usually takes immigration officials two weeks to set a date for renewal. Immigration laws change so fast that the government is constantly updating its website and giving that as a reason for not setting visa renewal appointments.
“I’ve been waiting on a date since February,” Isha said. “It’s been well over six months now. I’m still waiting to get a date for renewal. I cannot leave until I have a renewal date. If I leave, I don’t know when I’ll get the renewal date, and I cannot come back until I get a renewed stamp.”
‘I can’t imagine what life is like now’
While misery doesn’t necessarily love company, Isha certainly has plenty of company and empathy.
“A lot of Americans underestimate the amount of work it takes to actually make it to the U.S. as an international student,” said Nathifa, who earned her master’s degree at an American university.
Nathifa, who also preferred to protect her identity behind a pseudonym, worked for a few months in the United States before being forced to return to her home country.
It’s no surprise that international student numbers are declining, she told Street Roots.
“There’s the blatantly hostile immigration rules that are keeping students out, but there’s also just the pernicious rise in right-wing anti-immigrant ideologies that I reckon will make life doubly challenging for any international student that is able to gain access into the United States these days.”
International students help broaden Americans’ perspective, Nathifa said.
“There’s a texture and quality of cultural exchange that happens with accepting students from many parts of the world into an American classroom,” she said. “I saw it in my own time teaching undergrads — bringing in literature they’d normally not encounter, expanding their minds about how people live and work and think elsewhere in the world, the experiential knowledge from classmates and teachers they’d not encounter otherwise. These are invaluable lessons that create much more rounded young adults with empathy and care for the ‘other’ as opposed to fear or disdain or pity, which is what this current administration clearly wants to champion and support.”
Maybe that’s another reason international students face hostility from a xenophobic administration, she added.
“It’s no surprise, really, that they’re trying to keep international students away from American campuses,” said Nathifa.
She said her own experience in the United States was invaluable, but she wouldn’t trade places with current international students.
“I can’t imagine what life is like now for current international students with masked agents whisking people away from their homes in unmarked vans and student visas being revoked for no reason and without recourse,” she said. “I was considering returning for another graduate degree, but that plan is shelved right now.”
‘Why am I not enough? That’s the injustice of it’
Isha said her American boyfriend tells her not to worry. He will marry her to help her obtain permanent residence. First of all, she said, it’s not that easy. Secondly, despite her boyfriend’s good intentions, the suggestion irritates her.
“Why are the structures put in place in a way that he has to ‘save’ me?” she said. “Why am I not enough? That’s the injustice of it. I am enough. He shouldn’t be saving me.”
Meanwhile, the agents are on the streets.
“This feeling of ‘I’m a target’ is always there because of everything that’s going with ICE detentions,” she said. “I’m that model minority. I don’t have a criminal record. Despite that, I still live with the fear of being disappeared off the street. It’s a weird space to be in.”
Nonetheless, she keeps plugging away. Even she isn’t sure why.
“Is it worth it? Honestly, I don’t know if it’s worth it,” she said. “What keeps me going is that I’ve invested so much in this process. I’ve devoted so much time. I’m physically, professionally, mentally, psychologically, emotionally, academically invested in every way possible that makes me who I am. I’m invested. I have absolutely no imagination for what it would look like if I wasn’t here. This is my life now.”
Isha said it also helps that Trump and his administration do not represent the whole of the American people.
“There are people who deeply care who give me hope,” she said. “There are people who stand by me. I find these connections very beautiful. It’s only possible in hard times like this. Do I wish for hard times like this? No. However, there’s that silver lining.”
That silver lining is still awfully slim, she said as she tried not to cry. No matter how plucky and optimistic she tries to be, the fear is always there.
“Fear keeps me going too, honestly,” she said. “I’m an only child now. My parents need me.”
This article appears in September 9, 2026.