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US State Department signals foreign student visa suspension will be brief
Tammy Bruce urged prospective students to seek visa appointments, saying, “I would not be recommending that if this was going to be weeks or months.”
The US State Department on Thursday indicated that a global suspension on visa processing for international students would be brief, as it ramps up scrutiny of applicants’ social media activity.
State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce encouraged prospective students to seek visa appointments and said, “I would not be recommending that if this was going to be weeks or months.”
“I can tell you that it's something that would happen perhaps sooner than later,” she told reporters.
Tammy Bruce said that prospective students should start checking online for when appointments become available.
“Right now there might be some delay, and what I'm told to encourage people to do is to regularly check to see when those spaces open,” she said.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday ordered embassies and consulates to pause scheduling appointments for student visas pending new guidelines on checking applicants’ social media postings.
It is one of a series of battles waged over education by President Donald Trump’s administration, which has rescinded thousands of visas, sought to ban Harvard University from accepting any international students, and vowed to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students.
Rubio has revoked visas for a large number of students who led demonstrations critical of Israel’s offensive in Gaza, as he uses an obscure law that allows the removal of people deemed to go against US foreign policy interests.
In his cable to diplomatic missions on Tuesday, Rubio said that the new guidance on social media vetting would be issued in the “coming days.”
US won’t tolerate CCP exploiting universities or stealing research
Bruce also said that the United States will not tolerate the “exploitation” of American universities by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or the theft of US research and intellectual property.
However, she declined to specify how many Chinese students would be affected by the new plan to “aggressively” revoke visas announced on Wednesday.
She added that officials would scrutinise anyone “deemed to be a threat to the country or a problem.”
Bruce added that she would not provide details on how those considered threats would be identified.
With agencies inputs
