Why US universities want foreign students to return before Trump takes charge in January

Ahead of Donald Trump taking office in January, universities are warning their students to return to their campuses.

Trump, who is US President-elect, has vowed to carry out the ‘largest mass deportation programme in history’ after returning to power.

Trump has even pledged to use the US military to do so.

But why are universities worried? What do we know?

Let’s take a closer look:

What happened?

According to BBC, a number of universities have been emailing international students asking them to return to campus prior to the presidential inauguration on January 20.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst last week in a travel advisory to its international students and faculty called on them to “strongly consider” returning to the US prior to the inauguration, as per Huffington Post.

The school, which has over 5,000 students, said it was doing so “out of an abundance of caution.”

It cited the previous travel bans ordered by Trump .

“Given that a new presidential administration can enact new policies on their first day in office (January 20), and based on previous experience with travel bans that were enacted in the first Trump Administration in 2016, the Office of Global Affairs is making this advisory out of an abundance of caution to hopefully prevent any possible travel disruption to members of our international community,” the UMass office said in a statement.

“We are not able to speculate on what a travel ban will look like if enacted, nor can we speculate on what particular countries or regions of the world may or may not be affected.”

The University of Massachusetts Amherst isn’t the only one doing so.

The famed Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has also issued a similar advisory.

The university said Trump’s executive orders could hamper travel and visa processing times.

Trump’s original travel ban barred nearly all immigrants and travellers from seven countries with majority Muslim populations.

The policy was revised amid court challenges, but the US Supreme Court ultimately upheld it in June 2018.

How many international students are in the US?

The US has over 400,000 undocumented students enrolled at its institutes of higher learning, the outlet quoted data from the Higher Ed Immigration Portal as showing.

According to Huffington Post, the US this year had over 1.1 million international students – a record number.

Total admissions increased by seven per cent, it quoted data from the National Center for Education Statistics as showing.

Most students were from India and China – 29 per cent and 25 per cent respectively.

Most of them were enrolled at New York University, Northeastern University, Columbia University and Arizona State University.

As per Hindustan Times, India has sent over 331,600 students to the US in 2023-2024 – the most students of any country and the first time since 2009.

That’s a 23 per cent spike over the 2022-2023 academic year.

India, for the second straight year, has sent the most masters and PhD-level) students to the US.

How are students feeling?

“All international students are worried right now,” University of Colorado Denver professor Chloe East told the BBC.

“Students are incredibly overwhelmed and stressed out right now as a result of the uncertainty around immigration,” East added.

“A lot of students have concerns about their visas and whether they’ll be allowed to continue their education.”

Aoi Maeda, an international student from Japan at Earlham College in Indiana, told BBC, “I am planning to graduate in May 2026, but now that the administration is going to be a little bit more dangerous, I’m less hopeful about things going well,” she said.

“[Trump] claims that he is only interested in keeping illegal immigrants out of the country, but he also kind of tries to move the goal post a lot of times,” Maeda continued.

“I feel like us international students with a visa might get affected, and it’ll become easier to deport us.”

With inputs from agencies