Secretary of State Marco Rubio testifies during his Senate Foreign Relations confirmation hearing on … More January 15, 2025. Rubio declared a “one-strike policy” against students and all temporary visa holders, including workers in H-1B status and visitors. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared a “one-strike” immigration policy for students and all temporary visa holders, including visitors and foreign-born professionals in H-1B status. The announcement may alarm international students already concerned about the government canceling visas and attempting to deport individuals in high-profile cases. Rubio’s statement may also attract the attention of H-1B visa holders and their employers. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has started issuing Requests for Evidence for H-1B and employment-based immigrant petitions when claiming to have “adverse information” on individuals.

The Immigration Threat To Temporary Visa Holders

On April 30, 2025, Marco Rubio authored a State Department document that announced a zero-tolerance policy toward temporary visa holders. He posted the statement to mark the first 100 days of the Trump administration.

“Critically, the State Department has now made clear that a visa is a privilege, not a right,” writes Rubio. “Under the Biden Administration’s ‘Catch and Release’ policy, illegal aliens were often provided with a get-out-of-jail-free card after arrests for criminal activity including domestic violence, and assault. There is now a one-strike policy: Catch-And-Revoke. Whenever the government catches non-U.S. citizens breaking our laws, we will take action to revoke their status. The time of contemptuously taking advantage of our nation’s generosity ends.” (Emphasis added.)

While the policy applies to all temporary visa holders, the statement singles out international students. “This extends to the thousands of foreign students studying in the United States who abuse our hospitality.” He described the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, and said, “The Biden Administration did very little to protect our Jewish citizens and the American people at large from foreign terrorist sympathizers in their midst. They allowed campus buildings to be overrun by violent thugs, and Jewish students to be excluded from classrooms.”

Rubio writes, “Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, any alien who ‘endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization’ is inadmissible to the United States, and henceforth that law will be enforced to the letter. The State Department now reviews law-enforcement information about student visa holders and when we find those who have supported terrorists or otherwise abused our hospitality, their visas are instantly revoked.” (Emphasis added.)

Based on administration enforcement actions, “otherwise abused our hospitality” could include involvement in protests, writing op-eds or arrests for minor or serious offenses.

Neoclassical architecture columns and stairs to the entrance of the Massachusetts Institute of … More Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Photo by: Sergi Reboredo/VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

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How Immigration Authorities Targeted Students With Minor Infractions

The State Department rocked university campuses by targeting international students and ordering them to leave the United States for minor infractions and without the opportunity to respond to allegations.

“Beginning in March, as many as 20 Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, aided by contractors, ran 1.3 million names of foreign students through a federal database that tracks criminal histories, missing persons and other brushes with the law,” write Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein in Politico. “The search found about 6,400 ‘hits’ that officials concluded were solid matches for names and other biographical details in the students’ records, Homeland Security officials said during a hearing.”

The information about the origins of the federal effort against students came in response to questions from U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes at a court hearing.

“Many of those hits flagged students who had minor interactions with police—arrests for reckless driving, DUIs and misdemeanors, with charges often dropped or never brought at all—far short of the legal standard required to revoke a student’s legal ability to study in the U.S.,” according to Politico. “Nevertheless, ICE officials used that data to ‘terminate’ the students’ records in an online database schools and ICE use to track student visa holders in the U.S. Those terminations led schools to bar students from attending classes—some just weeks from graduation—and warn that they could be at risk of immediate deportation.”

Lawsuits around the country stopped deportations, resulting in the Trump administration announcing it would not terminate student records or their status.

Analysts say the Trump administration did not show concern for the impact of its actions on individuals or the consequences for America’s reputation as a center of knowledge. “Hundreds of the terminations, an ICE official who helped oversee the effort said, came less than 24 hours after an April 1 email exchange between his office and the State Department, with little sign of review of individual cases to ensure the decisions were accurate,” report Cheney and Gerstein. “In addition, the State Department relied on the data to revoke the visas of 3,000 people.”

Immigration Efforts Will Continue To Worry Students, Researchers And Employers

Marco Rubio’s statement indicates the Trump administration believes it did nothing wrong in revoking student visas and adopting a policy that targeted many individuals with minor infractions not considered deportable offenses.

“Those who are impacted by Rubio’s catch and revoke policy should not hesitate to challenge the actions in court,” said immigration attorney Cyrus Mehta. “If the revocation of the underlying visa results in detention and removal proceedings, they should challenge the detention as unconstitutional through a habeas petition in federal district court and also separately contest the deportation grounds in immigration court.”

“The only way to get the government to back down and prevent it from creating a climate of fear among nonimmigrants [temporary visa holders] in the United States is through concerted legal action that challenges detention and deportation at the same time,” said Mehta.

“What we’re seeing recently, particularly in the F-1 student context, is a shift,” said attorney Steven Brown of Reddy Neumann Brown. “There is troubling coordination between the State Department and DHS, where revocations—even those based on minor or dismissed matters, such as traffic tickets flagged in the NCIC law enforcement database—are being used to trigger SEVIS [Student and Exchange Visitor Information System] terminations which impacts a student’s status. That’s a sharp departure from past practice and one currently being litigated.”

Brown does not believe federal authorities can terminate a status by revoking a visa without removal proceedings. The procedures followed will matter if the government decides to enact a “catch and revoke” approach in the employment area.

“The landscape for H-1B professionals is structurally different,” said Brown. “Terminating an H-1B worker’s status would typically require either initiation of removal proceedings or formal USCIS action such as a Notice of Intent to Revoke or NOIR sent to the employer, with an opportunity to respond. That due process requirement acts as a safeguard, at least for now.”

Brown notes that employers and workers should be attentive to changes in enforcement practices, ensure compliance with visa conditions and be prepared to file in court when necessary. He hopes the recent blowback and litigation around student visas will push federal agencies to approach employment-based visas with more precision and restraint.

The rhetoric around “catch and revoke” raises the alarm for attorneys, employers and universities following immigration policy. According to Brown, “If implemented without procedural safeguards or with a broad brush, it risks undermining core legal principles and causing unnecessary harm to law-abiding visa holders.”