Universities across Minnesota are scrambling to help international students after more students had their visas revoked, schools reported Thursday, just a day after five international students in Mankato had their student visas terminated.

At Minnesota State, one international student enrolled at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul and another at Ridgewater College, a two-year college with campuses in Hutchinson and Willmar, had their visas revoked recently, but spokespeople for the institutions wouldn’t specify when or why.

In central Minnesota at St. Cloud State University, a “handful” of international students had their records terminated within the Student Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the university said they were working directly with affected students to support them.

The move comes after a wave of high-profile arrests of international students. Last week, a yet-unnamed Mankato international student was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and a Turkish University of Minnesota graduate student, Doğukan Günaydın, was detained over a previous drunken driving conviction.

At Minnesota State University, Mankato, President Edward Inch announced Wednesday that neither the university nor the students who had their records terminated from SEVIS were notified about it, and only found out after the university “ran a status check.”

The five students whose visas were revoked will have to return to their home countries within 60 days, Inch said Wednesday. One of the students who lost their visa was close to completing their studies, Inch said at the student assembly on Wednesday. “We’re going to do our best to ensure the students are able to complete their classes,” he said.

At Metro State, the school has 175 international students on F-1 visas, while Ridgewater has seven. Both colleges’ spokespeople said they could not provide any further information due to student data privacy rules.

St. Cloud State has more than 1,700 international students, according to Open Door’s 2024 data.

Ridgewater “will work with each student individually to help them find the support they need,” said Kelly Magnuson, vice president of enrollment at Ridgewater, in a statement.

Many other Minnesota colleges and universities contacted by the Minnesota Star Tribune on Thursday did not respond to inquiries about whether they had students with revoked visas, but at least 12 institutions across the state — including Macalester, Minnesota State University Winona and the College of St. Scholastica — said they checked their systems and didn’t have any new visa revocations.

Other institutions, like St. Paul College, didn’t say whether there were additional revocations but said they were monitoring the situation and offering their international students support.

Twin Cities immigration attorney David Wilson said he’s representing other international students who have had their visas revoked, some of which occurred several days ago, but institutions and students weren’t aware of the changes right away, he said.

“I think (colleges and universities) are just now paying attention to these things,” he said. “The underlying condition, the SEVIS terminations ... is probably being done on a wider scale than we initially appreciated.”

The students’ records are held within SEVIS, an electronic monitoring program created in response to 9/11 to communicate when international college students stop attending school, he said. Colleges receive access to the system from ICE. Students do not have access themselves.

He said he’s being “inundated with requests for help” because international students are “freaking out,” sometimes worrying about infractions as small as a parking ticket, he said.

It’s hard to counsel them because this has never happened in this way before and the government may not have the authority to do this, he said. No one knows what is triggering revocations and there’s been no advance notice this was going to occur.

The federal government is supposed to give notice of such things and then people are supposed to get a chance to respond, he said.

“Students aren’t being told this; they’re finding out from their school,” Wilson said. “This isn’t how we expect orderly government to work.”

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