Taylor’s international students are under a lot of pressure.
Recently, the Trump administration has made a number of clarifications and changes in the way it treats international students who hold F-1 visas.
One of the major changes affects how long students can stay in the country. Prior to these changes, the ability for international students to stay in the country was tied to their student status, said Nate Chu, executive director of spiritual life and intercultural leadership at Taylor.
In June, however, the rules changed: students’ duration of status is now tied to an Admitted Until Date, four years after entry, or the duration of their program. Students lose their status on the sooner date, he said.
“It would change how you could transfer to a different school or go to grad school, right?” Chu said. “It would require either an extension of stay file, or you have to travel the country and you got to leave and come back in the country.”
Furthermore, he said, it restricts the students’ ability to change their major — since that could potentially push their program end-date past the four-year Admitted Until Date.
Those changes were slated to be implemented on Sept. 15 — until, in a last minute ruling, a federal judge issued an injunction the day before. Now, the potential changes are on hold, stuck in a legal limbo with no definitive end.
When something happens, Chu said, Taylor students will be the first to know.
“Our office is monitoring this; like, this is something that we’re keeping track of,” he said. “We don't know when litigation is going to happen. We don’t know what the results are going to be, right? But we are monitoring it, and we will keep our students apprised of what happens.”
Students, then, are left waiting for a ruling to come down. Hali Dikhtiar, co-president of Taylor’s International Student Society, spoke to how many international students feel.
“A lot of them are stressed, honestly,” said Dikhtiar, who has a green card and isn’t affected by the proposed changes. “As soon as it was sent out, or, like, as soon as some of my friends found out, they were very stressed, and we were talking about this, and I feel like they take changes in their major more seriously now.”
That burden, she said, fell strongest on the freshmen. Many of them, international or American, have no idea what they want to do with their lives. These changes make it harder for them to decide; every change now comes with a cost.
Perhaps the most disturbing result of that stress is the reserve students show in talking about it: multiple students would not speak on the topic for fear of retaliation — either from Taylor, from future employers and from the government.
That self-censorship isn’t just happening at Taylor. In a 2025 article, the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that foreign students were less likely to speak about controversial topics after the start of Trump’s presidency. That trend has continued into 2026 — last June, the International House Berkeley found nine out of ten international students were self-censoring on social media.
And with good cause: one student mentioned that their phone would be searched when arriving in the U.S., leading them to avoid texting about the subject and only talking in person.
More seriously, who can forget Rumesa Ozturk, arrested by plain-clothed ICE agents for the crime of writing a pro-Palestinian opinion piece in her student newspaper? Or Mario Guevara, an El Salvadorean journalist arrested after covering an ICE raid for a Spanish-language outlet?
The result is a group of students anxious about the future and unable to talk about it — a chilling prospect for a liberal arts university, a fact Dikhtiar recognizes.
“For a freshman specifically, or a sophomore, or even a college student, it’s a lot of pressure and a lot of legal stuff,” she said. “It’s a big deal, and for college students who are basically still kids, have to navigate and figure it out in other countries. It’s really hard, I think, for them.”
