Foreign media workers and students coming to the United States for journalism schools and fellowships could get caught up in the Trump administration’s pause on certain visa interviews.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio instructed all American embassies and consulates Tuesday to stop scheduling student and exchange visitor visa interviews, Politico reported. Though the State Department will allow previously scheduled appointments to proceed, it is halting new interviews until it can release expanded guidelines on “social media screening and vetting” for visa applicants.
It is unclear how long the pause will last — Rubio’s message said the new rules will be issued “in the coming days” — but foreign nationals currently applying for visas to participate in journalism programs and fellowships during the 2025-2026 academic year will likely be affected.
Some of the top journalism schools in the country enroll a significant number of international students. For example, international students made up 28% of the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism’s class last year and 25% of enrollees at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism boasts that its programs include students from nearly 50 countries.
Prestigious journalism fellowships in the U.S. also admit foreign nationals. Each year, international journalists make up roughly half of the class of Harvard University’s Nieman Fellowship and a third of the class of the University of Michigan’s Knight-Wallace Fellowship. More than a third of the incoming class of John S. Knight Journalism Fellows at Stanford University are international.
(Harvard’s incoming international Nieman Fellows have already had to grapple with uncertainty regarding their visas after the Trump administration attempted to revoke the university’s ability to sponsor visas for international scholars last week.)
Though Rubio’s order does not specify what the new vetting procedures will entail, it “alludes to executive orders that are aimed at keeping out terrorists and battling antisemitism,” Politico reported. Since President Donald Trump took office, the State Department has revoked thousands of visas, including those of international students who participated in protests for Palestine last year.
The crackdown on student activists led to Columbia Journalism School staff advising students in March to scrub their social media accounts and avoid publishing content about sensitive topics like Ukraine and Gaza. Less than two weeks later, the Trump administration detained Tufts University Ph.D. student Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish national, for an op-ed she had co-authored last year for her university’s student paper.
Trump’s attacks on higher education, the press and free speech more broadly have led some J-schools and student newspapers to take extra steps to ensure international student journalists understand their rights and the risks they face in the current political climate.
This piece originally appeared in The Poynter Report, our daily newsletter for everyone who cares about the media. Subscribe to The Poynter Report here.
