CHICAGO — It was a typical Thursday night for the financial analyst, who was watching “Lord of the Rings” when he got the email with the subject line “visa revoked.” At first, the University of Illinois Chicago grad from India thought it was a joke — just a scam email from some Indian website trying to mess with him.

But then he received a second email after he tried logging into his Student and Exchange Visitor Program portal. “Your OPT authorization period has ended,” the email read.

At that moment, his entire life paused. The former student, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, graduated from UIC in 2023 and was continuing to work in the U.S. on a STEM optional practical training extension. He previously worked at Bank of America and was being considered for a role at J.P. Morgan.

Now, he has to focus on self-deporting, selling off items like his TV and giving away other belongings to his friends. He plans on leaving the country April 13 and is unsure whether he’ll even be able to work for J.P. Morgan.

“I would choose to stay and fight but on Reddit I’ve been hearing different stories about ICE detaining students,” the former student said.

He is one of hundreds of international students nationwide who have had their visas terminated in the past few weeks for unclear or arbitrary reasons.

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a student one month away from graduating seemingly had her visa revoked for a previous traffic violation. In Florida, a student from Colombia was taken into custody by immigration agents after he was stopped by Gainesville police with an expired registration and driver’s license. He signed his self-deportation and returned home.

In Illinois alone, dozens of students have had their visas revoked, with seven confirmed cases from the University of Chicago and eight confirmed cases from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. A high-ranking official at U. of I. who did not have permission to speak on the record told the Tribune that 19 students had their visas rescinded, according to data in the SEVIS system, an online system used to monitor the records and information of international students on F-1 or J-1 visas and keep track of students whose visa status is being challenged.

Students from UIC, Northwestern and Southern Illinois University Carbondale also have had their visas terminated; officials from those schools declined to say how many.

The mass terminations have left students scrambling, with many unsure what to do next and whether they can continue their studies.

“These calls are flooding in,” said Jon Velie, an immigration and litigation attorney in Oklahoma whose firm is preparing to file a lawsuit in response to the student visa revocations. “I probably had 10 different people call a day, a couple just walked in. It’s nuts. There’s a lot of anxiety.”

Among the students he’s spoken to, Velie found that many of those who had their visas revoked had traffic violations or misdemeanor cases that were dropped — incidents he said do not rise to the level of a deportable offense.

“You retroactively can’t change the law,” Velie said. “So if a new law changed and said that a parking ticket was a deportable offense, you can’t go back retroactively and say ‘You parked illegally last week or two years ago or in 1999.’ Laws don’t work that way.”

Legal experts say once a SEVIS record is terminated, a student’s legal status becomes immediately invalid and they must either leave the U.S. within the grace period, typically 15 days, or take steps to restore their status. Otherwise, they may risk deportation and future visa restrictions.

The UIC grad, originally from India, said his university was not aware of his visa revocation until he called student legal services for guidance. The email he received from the U.S. Consulate General Mumbai regarding his visa termination, which was reviewed by the Tribune, said only that the visa was revoked because “additional information became available” after the visa was issued.

Some visa terminations have been related to participation in pro-Palestinian protests or political speech criticizing Israel, such as the high-profile case of Mahmoud Khalil, who helped lead last spring’s protests at Columbia University and now faces possible deportation despite facing no criminal charges.

The UIC grad believes the reason his visa may have been revoked is a misdemeanor charge back in 2019. He was working in the U.S. at the time and said he got into a fight with a girlfriend he was living with at the time. The neighbors overheard the fight and eventually ended up calling the cops on him, which led to him getting arrested.

Charges were never pressed against him and the court ordered him to take anger management classes. He never had any run-ins with the law after that.

Several months later, the former student lost his job in a round of layoffs. That layoff, combined with the on-set of the COVID-19 pandemic, led him to return to India.

The former student has since tried to move on from the arrest, but he said the incident left a huge mark on his conscience.

“I just don’t want my life to be defined by some misunderstanding that the neighbors had,” he said. “I have just been trying to get my education, move forward in life, not to get into situations like these again.”

And he’s been doing just that. He reentered the U.S. in 2022 to begin his master’s program at UIC, during which he was honest about the arrest.

“I’ve been nothing but transparent with the U.S. government,” the former student said. “During my reapplication, I had all the relevant paperwork related to my misdemeanor. Since charges were dropped and the case was dismissed after taking anger management sessions, I was approved for a visa by the officer in my home country.”

The former student had an arrest record on file and nothing else, and while that arrest record caused extra scrutiny from his former employer Bank of America later down the line, it ultimately did not stop him from getting the job.

Coming to America to study was also a huge dream for him ever since he was 18. He thought there were more opportunities here in the field he was interested in. He persuaded his parents to let him go to the U.S. and in 2014, started his studies in computer science at Rutgers University.

“I was a guy who never left his home, and everyone assumed that I would be home sick a lot,” he said.

But once he arrived in the U.S., he found himself flourishing. Here, he said he could pursue different paths of intellectual curiosity and take classes that had nothing to do with his computer science studies, something he did not feel like he could do back in India.

“You feel like your life is in your own hands. You can do whatever you want with your life,” he said.

That possibility is what made him want to continue to work and study in the U.S. The former student, now 29, said his dream was to work in the U.S. at a bank for a long period of time, pursue a Ph.D. in the U.S. and potentially become a professor. Now, he is giving up those dreams and is going to begin the application process for Ph.D. programs in Europe.

“I was really angry. I was really angry with myself. I was really angry with the things that are happening,” he said. “I’m trying not to think about it, and trying to avoid processing it.”

Experts have previously told the Tribune that the mass student visa cancellations may cause some students with strong training and educational background in STEM fields to take their skills elsewhere.

“You can take your degree and go somewhere else,” said Ida Salusky, a research associate professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine who works with many international students in the biomedical sciences. “If people feel unwelcome or they feel like they’re going to be under threat, if and when they transition from a student visa to a work visa, if you’re an engineer or you’re a highly skilled biochemist, you can get jobs in other countries.”

The UIC graduate felt that sentiment.

“I’m just trying to avoid all the future risk that I might have after reapplication here,” he said. “So in my mind, I think Ph.D. programs in Europe make sense because the reason for visa revocation here is probably going to be the only thing that is going to cause any issues at all if I apply to colleges there.”

Still, the decision to pivot away from his dreams was not an easy one and even shocked some of his friends.

“My friends think of me as a person who won’t stop until he gets what he wants,” he said. “So me basically saying that I’m not going to do that anymore is more of a shock than whatever visa revocation shock that I faced. … I think that goes to show how dedicated I’ve been so far to make my dreams happen.”

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