SEVERAL HUNDRED INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS have now had their student visas revoked by the Trump Administration’s “Catch and Revoke” program

More than 600 international students and recent graduates in the US have had their visas revoked or their legal status changed by the state department, according to data aggregated from around the country.

TheGuardian The initiative, newly launched by the state department, which says it is at least partly powered by artificial intelligence (AI), scrapes social media to find “foreign nationals who are anti-Semitic and/or those who  support Hamas or other designated terrorist groups” and cancel their visas, according to reporting from Axios.

The data, collected by Inside Higher Ed, shows that as of Thursday more than 100 colleges and universities have identified more than 600 cases of students whose immigration status was changed by the Trump administration. These institutions say that their students have lost their F-1 or J-1 student visas.

Many of these cases were related to their activism and participation in student-led protests against the war in Gaza, and others were for “minor crimes”. Inside Higher Ed says that the majority of college officials say they’re unsure why the foreign-born students had their visas revoked or have yet to receive formal notification of the changes. Most have still not received any communications from immigration authorities.

The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, confirmed the scale of the March crackdown and referred to the student activists as “lunatics.” Though the majority of the abrupt visa cancellations are directed at students who engage in pro-terrorist activism, students with minor non-criminal infractions, such as speeding tickets, were also targeted.

Two cases which received widespread attention were those of Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate who led pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus last summer, and Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish student at Tufts University who was arrested in apparent retaliation for an op-ed she wrote that was critical of Israel. Both are in Ice detention fighting their deportations.