Earlier this year, an international student from China, who wishes to be addressed as “G” due to safety concerns, decided to transfer out of Wesleyan University in Middletown. The move was partly due to financial reasons.
It was also due to proximity: she wanted to be closer to her home city of Beijing, so she chose a school further west. This summer, she arranged to stay on campus at Wesleyan, doing STEM research. Then, she would fly over to her new school. At least, that was the plan. Then, the Trump administration released a statement on May 28 concerning student visas.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, the U.S. State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote in a May 28 press statement, titled “New Visa Policies Put America First, Not China.” The statement further read: “We will also revise visa criteria to enhance scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People’s Republic of China and Hong Kong.”
Rubio’s statement came on the heels of an earlier wave of visa crackdowns in April, when the Trump administration revoked hundreds of international students’ visas across American college campuses. At least 63 visas of students studying in Connecticut were revoked, including 13 at the University of Connecticut and four at Yale University.
Naturally, Rubio’s announcement came as a second shock to G., who has a student visa.
“I’m not their main target, but the issue of this statement from an official government agency, at the time, was really concerning,” G. said. “The Trump administration has a history of freezing international students' visas and CV records, so I was concerned if they were going to do the same.”
Since G. had already accepted the offer to transfer, she was no longer a student at Wesleyan University. The school still permitted her to work there. But after the Trump administration’s announcement on May 28, she questioned whether this was a risk worth taking.
“I talked to my advisor about it, and he advised me to do the transfer process as soon as possible, just because we’re not sure what the Trump administration is trying to do,” G. said. “We can never predict his next action. That’s why I decided to end my research early.”
On June 11, Trump announced on Truth Social, an alt tech, social media platform owned by Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG), that he was relaxing the policy in exchange for trade cooperation from China.
By that time, G.was already back in Beijing, visiting family. A few days later, she was on a plane back to the U.S., headed to her new college.
For international students, one should expect to be far from home for long periods of time. Still, there are some extreme cases: G. says it’s not uncommon for masters and doctoral students from China to stay in the U.S. for the entire duration of their studies, which can last up to seven years. This is because they fear being denied reentry on return and having their entire education go to waste.
“I feel like there’s definitely a lot of concerns for international students,” G. said. “My family, they don’t want me to go back [to China] because there’s a risk of me not getting my bachelor’s degree.”
That fear has long been brewing. In June 2020, an executive order issued by President Donald Trump had placed certain “suspensions and limitations” on Chinese scientists entering the United States.
The order cited threats that China could acquire “sensitive United States technologies and intellectual property to modernize its military.” Since then, the volume of applications to American undergrad programs from China has dropped, while applications from other countries like Bangladesh and India have increased.
In early 2024, some international students reported being subject to lengthy interrogations, or outright deportations, upon returning to the United States from China.
The Asian American community is also still recovering from the trauma of anti-Asian hate crimes at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. In that period, scores of Asian people, especially Chinese people, reported being attacked, threatened, and verbally abused, in restaurants, on subways, or simply on the street.
A 2022-2023 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center reported that about one in three Asian people in the U.S. personally know another Asian person who was attacked or threatened due to their race.
Alienation has been felt among Chinese Americans as a whole, not just students. Ying Ye is a painter and visual artist born in Fuzhou, China. Ye lives in the Greater Hartford area and has lived in the United States for sixteen years.
Much of her art plays upon her experiences working in her father’s restaurant in Ellington, and how those experiences have shaped her identity and politics. She says that while her father has a green card, he is afraid to go back to China for fear of being denied reentry.
Last semester, Ying Ye was doing a studio art fellowship at Trinity College. She got the opportunity to interview international students for a performance piece. Some of them had friends who were arrested, and were so terrified by those experiences that they wouldn’t even allow audio of themselves to be recorded.
“Some people are afraid, because the people around them got deported back to India or China,” she said. “They are afraid to talk about that, and some of them are actually brave enough to be participating. Colleges have organized events since that to educate the international students, how to, you know, defend for themselves.”
When it comes to collective organization, Ye says Connecticut’s Asian community has faced some obstacles. There are a number of Asian American community organizations in the state — Asian Pacific American Coalition (APAC) and New England Asian American Cultural Center (NEAACC) are two.
Ye also highlighted the important role Chinese churches play in the Chinese community. But Ye says solidarity is more or less stifled by a relatively small Asian population statewide and a general reluctance to speak out.
“In Connecticut, there's not so much of the Asian people, Asian faces, you know, who are also interested in the things you are doing,” Ye said. “And many of them are in survival mode …They don't really speak out, you know, so they don't know how to ask for help.”