5 UNC international students’ visas restored after Trump reversal, chancellor says (2025)

The visas of five international students at UNC-Chapel Hill have been restored after the Trump administration initially terminated them, Chancellor Lee Roberts said Friday.

“That’s a really positive development for those students,” Roberts said during a campus Faculty Council meeting. “We are trying to do everything that we know how to do to support the students who are affected.”

Six students at the university were impacted by the administration’s sweeping terminations of international students’ immigration records across the country, though the fate of the sixth student’s visa was not clear from Roberts’ update on Friday.

The news of the reversals at UNC comes after the U.S. Department of Justice announced in federal court Friday morning that it planned to restore the statuses of the students who were impacted by those actions, as reported by Politico and other outlets.

Barbara Stephenson, chief global officer at UNC, said university officials were “working through this afternoon, in real time” the impacts of Friday’s change.

“This is really, obviously, good news, but unraveling all of this is going to take so much time and energy that could be so much better spent on our mission,” Stephenson said. “And I fear we’re just still a ways away from making whole the students who are caught up in this.”

Several thousand students across the country were impacted by the terminations in recent weeks, according to a tally from Inside Higher Ed. In addition to the six terminations at UNC, two international students at NC State University had their visas terminated. Two students and an alumnus of Duke University also had their visas revoked, according to the Duke Chronicle.

International students are required to obtain visas to enroll and study at colleges around the United States. In addition to visas, international students are assigned records in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or SEVIS, a federal database maintained by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. If a student’s visa is revoked, it does not automatically mean they must leave the country.

But if a student’s SEVIS record is terminated — as the UNC students’ records were, according to the university — they could be subject to deportation or other removal proceedings.

In an interview with The Daily Tar Heel published Tuesday, Roberts said the students who have been impacted were being allowed to complete their studies abroad. NC State had allowed its two impacted students to do that, as well.

UNC, Duke and NC State each host thousands of international students on their campuses each year.

According to federal data, Duke last year enrolled more than 5,900 international students, the most of any university in the state. NC State followed close behind, with 5,475 international students, the second-most in the state and the most of any public university. UNC ranked fourth in the state and third in the UNC System, with more than 3,150 international students.

Roberts said Friday that “international students are crucial to our community.”

“They greatly enrich the life of our community here,” he said. “They’re crucial to what we do, in every facet.”

An NC State spokesperson did not immediately have information available Friday afternoon about whether any of the students impacted at that campus had their visas reinstated.

This story was originally published April 25, 2025 at 4:13 PM.