An Update on International Students and Academic Libraries

Posted on July 16, 2025 in Blog Posts

Since writing about the relationship between international students and academic libraries in November, the landscape for international students in the United States has become significantly more fraught. Previous advice spoke to building multilingual popular reading collections and library orientations, and strengthening relationships with international student organizations and offices. In the post before that, I wrote about how libraries’ and librarians’ professional ethics call us to advocate for and protect our undocumented students and community members, and what that advocacy could look like. Now, with the chaos and uncertainty caused by the various orders and statements coming from Trump administration officials over the last few months, those two topics are only gaining urgency as our international students are faced with increased scrutiny and uncertainty. 

Ostensibly focused on “violent, criminal, illegal immigrants,” the Department of Homeland Security’s agents have been detaining everyone from beloved small-town waitresses to polite, church-going teens on their way to volleyball practice. After the Trump administration claimed their writings and activism were anti-Semitic and posed a risk to national security, international students such as Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk were detained by masked, plainclothes ICE agents. Media coverage seemed to indicate that these students were targeted because they are affiliated with large American universities determined to be at odds ideologically with the Trump administration. However, students at institutions across the nation are similarly under threat.

In addition to taking punitive actions against students who engaged in pro-Palestine activism, the Trump administration is punishing all of higher education and our international students by halting interviews for student visas for the coming 2025–26 academic year. This pause occurs while the administration works to formalize a new vetting process for students seeking F-1 educational visas, by which prospective students’ social media profiles will be examined for content considered to be “derogatory.” The official statement from the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t attempt to give examples or expand on what “derogatory” means, nor does it seem to clarify this in its additional cables to U.S. embassies. 

International students from a variety of countries attending a range of institutions are feeling this pain equally. Students who long saw the United States as their escape from conservative, repressive regimes at home now see similar challenges corrupting their educational careers. The combination of the Department of Education’s Dear Colleague Letter, the executive orders against DEI, and continued attacks on immigrants has left minority students fearful, as their current safety and future opportunities in the United States are now precarious. In one example, the Associated Press wrote about Latvian student Markuss Saule at Brigham-Young University, who spent a ten-hour flight back to the US  fearfully scrubbing their phone of any apps or content that might prohibit their reentry. Many more students have canceled plans to travel within the United States, let alone internationally to visit their homes, for fear of detention and deportation. Plans to start a life and career in the United States after graduation have disappeared. Having originally come to the US through a high school exchange program, earned through academic achievements, Saule told the Associated Press, “Now I feel a sense of inferiority. I feel that I am expendable, that I am purely an appendage that is maybe getting cut off soon.”

At the University of San Antonio, a professor and researcher grieves another move by the Trump Administration that has impacted institutions of higher education in our nation: the cancellations of programs and grants formerly overseen by the National Institute of Health: “‘It took years to be where we are now,’ said Barea-Rodriguez, who said he was not speaking on behalf of his university, ‘and in a hundred days everything was destroyed.'”

The Maximizing Access to Research Careers grant program from NIH allowed students from underrepresented backgrounds to access opportunities like conferences, internships, and research appointments in STEM that would otherwise have been out of reach. Visa restrictions and increased scrutiny on international students will have a similar impact on STEM programs nationwide, as the majority of students coming to the US for higher education are coming to pursue degrees and certificates in STEM fields. International students who would have helped soften the blow of low enrollments by Americans are now considering other opportunities for higher education abroad. Many of these same students who might have entered our struggling healthcare system, or conducted advanced scientific research, are instead starting their careers elsewhere. 

Mental health on college campuses has been a major concern since before the pandemic, but now international students are particularly impacted. Already experiencing the stress and alienation of international travel and culture shock, challenging courses, and homesickness, these students are now considering how safe it is to leave their dorms for anything but classes. The Hechinger Report conveyed that international students at UC Berkeley will avoid walking near anything that looks like a protest or demonstration on campus, lest they be photographed and accused later of engaging in political activism that could endanger their visas. 

What can academic libraries and librarians do to help our international students during this incredibly difficult time? 

• Help your students stay up to date on changes in policy. Make a LibGuide that you advertise on your homepage and can update daily with news and information regarding the shifting landscape for international student visas. Libraries often have subscriptions to local newspapers and can provide highly localized information about immigration enforcement in the area that students would otherwise not see from large, national news networks. 
• Hire international students to work in your libraries. This gives them a legitimate source of income while pursuing their education, keeps them safely on campus where they are hopefully less likely to be targeted by immigration enforcement, and allows them to develop research and language skills by working alongside their academic librarians. 
• Don’t stop creating multilingual, popular reading collections, or doing outreach with your offices of international education! Make your libraries havens where international students can come and enjoy a novel, memoir, or comic by a familiar author and engage with content from their home cultures while they feel unable to visit home.
• As much as you are mentally and emotionally able, be an ear for your international students. Librarians know reference interactions can often come with unanticipated personal information, becoming as much therapy sessions as research sessions. This vulnerable community needs understanding adults in their lives. If you do not have the bandwidth, gently advise the students to make use of counselling services available to them on campus. 
• Emphasize electronic library resources that can be accessed from dorms or off campus accommodations for students who are fearful about spending too much time outdoors.

About the author:

Sam Berry-Sullivan is a white, nonbinary, neurodivergent academic librarian who leverages their privilege and unique experience of the world to advocate for diversity and equity in librarianship, higher education, and health sciences, for which Sam is subject liaison.

Sign up for Toward Inclusive Excellence (TIE) new post notifications and updates.

Interested in contributing to TIE? Send an email to Deb V. at Choice dvillavicencio@ala-choice.org with your topic idea.

---

Header image is a detail of This is Harlem by Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © 2021 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. For more information, click here.

Related Posts