The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revealed how they successfully enacted so many student visa terminations. At a court hearing on April 28, 2025, the agency explained it used twenty employees and a computerized index to sort through the names of 1.3 million foreign-born students through the National Crime Information Center (NCIC). The NCIC is an FBI-run computer index that includes information like criminal records.
The project, which officials dubbed the “Student Criminal Alien Initiative” produced a list of 6,400 individuals with criminal records. Three thousand names were sent to the State Department. It was the State Department that instructed the DHS to terminate each student’s Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) records along with the visa terminations.
The revelation offers insight as to why so many students had their student visas terminated in such a short amount of time, and why there were seemingly no criteria. Immigration officials drew from a database that critics argue is hard-wired to promote false positives. At least one individual had their status revoked because the database wasn’t updated with current information.
Some have also noted how the lack of staff involved in the initiative leaves room for human error. A chance that could be more likely given the Trump administration’s repeated cutbacks of federal agencies and departments.
This revelation confirms a worry many noncitizens in the U.S. have, that the government uses digital indexes to find individuals for immigration enforcement efforts. The recent bout of student visa terminations confirm that immigration agencies are relying on increasingly automated and digitized processes of identification.
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