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    U.S. Will ‘Aggressively’ Revoke Visas of Chinese Students, Rubio Says

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    Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the students who will have their visas canceled include people with ties to the Chinese Communist Party and those studying in “critical fields.”Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Wednesday evening that the Trump administration would work to “aggressively revoke” visas of Chinese students, including those with ties to the Chinese Communist Party or who are studying in “critical fields.”He added that the State Department was revising visa criteria to “enhance scrutiny” of all future applications from China, including Hong Kong.The move was certain to send ripples of anxiety across university campuses in the United States and was likely to lead to reprisal from China, the country of origin for the second-largest group of international students in the United States.Mr. Rubio’s brief statement announcing the visa crackdown did not define “critical fields” of study, but the phrase most likely refers to research in the physical sciences. In recent years, American officials have expressed concerns about the Chinese government recruiting U.S.-trained scientists, though there is no evidence of such scientists working for China in large numbers.Similarly, it is unclear how U.S. officials will determine which students have ties to the Communist Party. The lack of detail on the scope of the directive will no doubt fuel worries among the roughly 275,000 Chinese students in the United States, as well as professors and university administrators who depend on their research skills and financial support.American universities and research laboratories have benefited over many decades by drawing some of the most talented students from China and other countries, and many universities rely on international students paying full tuition for a substantial part of their annual revenue.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Judge Blocks Trump Administration From Arresting International Students or Revoking Visas

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      Judge Jeffrey White of the Northern District of California provided temporary relief to some international students while a legal battle continues.A federal judge on Thursday blocked the Trump administration’s wide-reaching effort to detain and deport international students, barring the federal government from arresting those students or revoking their visas while the case plays out in court.Judge Jeffrey S. White of the Northern District of California, who was appointed to the court by President George W. Bush, granted a temporary injunction protecting international students who were among the thousands whose visas were revoked earlier this year without clear justification, writing that government officials had “uniformly wreaked havoc” and “likely exceeded their authority and acted arbitrarily and capriciously” by the mass revocation of students’ immigration status.“The relief the court grants provides plaintiffs with a measure of stability and certainty,” Judge White wrote in the 21-page order. “That they will be able to continue their studies or their employment without the threat of re-termination hanging over their heads.”Judge White’s ruling said that the order applied to all “similarly situated individuals” who participate in the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, which is the system governing student visas. In the order, he expressed suspicion that the Trump administration was trying to place future visa “terminations beyond judicial review.”“At each turn in this and similar litigation across the nation,” Judge White wrote, “defendants have abruptly changed course to satisfy courts’ expressed concerns. It is unclear how this game of whack-a-mole will end unless defendants are enjoined from skirting their own mandatory regulations.”The order comes hours after the Trump administration halted Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, and it is likely that this nationwide order could at least in part prevent the Trump administration’s move from being enforced. More

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      Senate Democrats Grill Defiant Rubio on Trump Policies

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      There was shouting and gavel banging as Marco Rubio and his former Senate Democratic colleagues clashed over U.S. foreign aid.A defiant Secretary of State Marco Rubio clashed in sometimes personal terms with his former Senate Democratic colleagues on Tuesday, calling their criticism evidence of his success.At a hearing on the State Department budget, several Democrats on the Foreign Relations Committee said that they were deeply disappointed in Mr. Rubio and regretted voting for his confirmation.The contentious scene reflected Democratic fury over President Trump’s policies, such as the evisceration of U.S. foreign aid programs, which they said benefited rivals like China. Mr. Rubio, they argued, had betrayed his principles while serving Mr. Trump.“I have to tell you, directly and personally, that I regret voting for you for secretary of state,” Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, told Mr. Rubio after castigating him for approving huge cuts to aid programs promoting human rights, public health, food assistance and democracy.“First of all, your regret for voting for me confirms I’m doing a good job,” Mr. Rubio retorted, launching into an unapologetic response that produced shouting and gavel banging as Mr. Van Hollen called portions of Mr. Rubio’s answer “flippant” and “pathetic.”In January, the Senate confirmed Mr. Rubio, who served on the Foreign Relations Committee before joining Mr. Trump’s cabinet, by a 99-to-0 vote. Many Democrats said he had promised to be a responsible steward of the State Department. And they privately hoped Mr. Rubio would check Mr. Trump’s disruptive impulses.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Is Destroying a Core American Value. The World Will Notice.

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      In the late 1980s, Joseph Nye, the Harvard political scientist who died this month, developed the concept of “soft power.” His central premise, that the United States enhances its global influence by promoting values like human rights and democracy, has guided U.S. foreign policy for decades across both Republican and Democratic administrations.Donald Trump has made clear that he fundamentally rejects this vision. As president, he has ordered a sweeping overhaul of the State Department that will cripple its capacity to promote American values abroad. At the center of this effort are drastic cuts to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor — the State Department’s core institution for advancing soft power, which I led under President Barack Obama. Unless Congress intervenes, the debasement of the bureau’s role will impair America’s ability to challenge authoritarianism, support democratic movements and provide independent analysis to inform U.S. foreign policy. The long-term result will be a United States that is weaker, less principled and increasingly sidelined as authoritarian powers like Russia and China offer their own transactional models of global engagement.The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor was created with bipartisan congressional support in 1977, a time when lawmakers sought greater influence over foreign policy in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and America’s support for authoritarian regimes in countries like Chile and South Korea. President Jimmy Carter’s religious convictions and deep commitment to human rights gave the fledgling bureau early momentum. Still, its purpose was always practical: to ensure U.S. foreign aid and trade decisions were informed by credible assessments of human rights conditions around the world. That’s why every year, the bureau prepares congressionally mandated human rights reports.In its early years, it struggled to defend its existence. Foreign governments resented being called out in its annual reports and attacked its legitimacy. Many State Department traditionalists viewed its focus on human rights as an unhelpful distraction from the realpolitik topics they were much more comfortable addressing. It also drew criticisms of hypocrisy, mostly from the left, for condemning the records of other countries in the face of unresolved human rights problems here in the United States. Others accurately pointed out that even as the State Department’s human rights reports documented serious abuses, the United States continued to provide substantial aid to governments like Ferdinand E. Marcos’s Philippines, Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire, Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt and numerous military regimes across Latin America.These tensions have not disappeared. But over nearly five decades, the bureau has evolved to confront them. Governments, companies, judges and nongovernmental organizations have all come to rely on its annual country reports. It plays the lead role in preventing the United States from funding foreign security forces that violate human rights. And its policy engagement has guided the U.S. approach to international conflicts, repressive regimes and civil wars.That progress is now at risk. The Trump administration’s proposed “reforms” will hamstring my former agency’s capacity to uphold its mission in three major ways.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Marco Rubio Adds a New Title Under Trump: Interim National Security Adviser

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      The former senator from Florida is now the head of four government bodies. He has outdone Henry Kissinger and even Xi Jinping, China’s leader, who has only three main titles.Secretary of state. Acting administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Acting archivist for the National Archives and Records Administration. And now interim national security adviser to President Trump.Like a Christmas tree bedecked with shiny ornaments of every shape and size, Marco Rubio, 53, has accumulated four titles starting with his confirmation as secretary of state on Jan. 20, the same day that Mr. Trump took his oath of office.It very well could be a record in the modern history of the U.S. government. And it adds to the immigrant success story that is core to the narrative of Mr. Rubio, a former senator from Florida whose father worked as a bartender and mother toiled as a housekeeper after they left Cuba for the United States.But the proliferation of titles raises questions about whether Mr. Rubio can play any substantial role in the administration if he is juggling all these positions, especially under a president who eschews the traditional workings of government and who has appointed a businessman friend, Steve Witkoff, as a special envoy handling the most sensitive diplomacy.Mr. Trump announced Mr. Rubio’s newest position in a social media post on Thursday afternoon, a surprise twist in the first big personnel shake-up of this administration. The president had just ousted Michael Waltz from the White House national security adviser job as well as Mr. Waltz’s deputy, Alex Wong. In the same post, Mr. Trump said Mr. Waltz would now be his nominee to be ambassador to the United Nations.Mr. Rubio’s appointment to yet another job — as if he were cloned in a B-grade sci-fi movie — was so sudden that Tammy Bruce, the State Department spokeswoman, learned about it when a reporter read Mr. Trump’s social media post to her during a regular televised news conference.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Critics Call Rubio’s Overhaul Plan a Blow to U.S. Values

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      Human rights, democracy, refugees, war crimes.Those are some of the key responsibilities of a State Department office that Secretary of State Marco Rubio intends to shutter as part of a larger reorganization plan for his agency that he unveiled on Tuesday.The official goal of the office — the under secretary for civilian security, democracy and human rights — is to help countries “build more democratic, secure, stable, and just societies.”In a post on Substack on Tuesday, Mr. Rubio called the change a blow against rogue liberal bureaucrats, saying the office had become “a fertile environment for activists to redefine ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’ and to pursue their projects at the taxpayer expense” even when they conflict with the president’s goals.The office’s nine bureaus will be pared down and in most cases merged into other parts of the department under Mr. Rubio’s plan. Bureaus slated for elimination include those focused on conflict, global criminal justice and combating antisemitism.Two of the bureaus, including a smaller democracy and human rights bureau, will continue to exist under a new Office of the Coordinator for Foreign Assistance and Humanitarian Affairs. But that office will no longer be led by an under secretary.On Tuesday, a State Department spokeswoman, Tammy Bruce, cautioned that the changes did not mean the end of values-based initiatives in U.S. foreign policy, arguing that the goal was a “nimbler” department.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Judge Rules Against Trump Administration on Passport Changes

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      A group of transgender plaintiffs sued President Trump and the State Department over a new rule prohibiting passports from including a gender different from the sex listed on an original birth certificate.A federal judge in Boston on Friday ordered the Trump administration to issue passports that reflect the self-identified gender of six transgender people rather than requiring that the passports display the sex on the applicants’ original birth certificates.The order from Judge Julia E. Kobick was a victory, at least temporarily, for the six plaintiffs, who she said were likely to prevail on their claim that a new policy by the Trump administration amounts to a form of unconstitutional sex discrimination under the Fifth Amendment, as well as the Administrative Procedures Act. The State Department adopted the new policy earlier this year to comply with an executive order from President Trump directing all government agencies to limit official recognition of transgender identity.“The plaintiffs have been personally disadvantaged by the government — they can no longer obtain a passport consistent with their gender identity — because of their sex assigned at birth,” wrote Judge Kobick, who was nominated by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “The passport policy does indeed impose a special disadvantage on the plaintiffs due to their sex and the court therefore concludes that it discriminates on the basis of sex.”The judge’s order on Friday applied only to six transgender plaintiffs who were seeking new passports and had sued the Trump administration. The order does not apply to a seventh plaintiff, who already holds a passport, valid until 2028, with the sex marker that corresponds to his gender identity. The order, which will remain in place as the case goes forward, does not bar the government from the new passport requirement for other transgender people.In court documents, the plaintiffs suing the government argued that a mismatch between the sex listed on their passport and the way they think of themselves and are perceived puts them at risk of suspicion and hostility that other Americans do not face. During the first several weeks of Mr. Trump’s administration, two plaintiffs received passports with an “F” or “M” marker that was contrary to what they had requested. Another plaintiff learned that selecting an “X” marker, indicating a nonbinary gender identity, was no longer an option in the application process, though it had been allowed since 2022.The restrictions on passports are part of a broad effort by the Trump administration to minimize the role of gender identity in how American society organizes itself. In the first of a series of executive orders on transgender issues, Mr. Trump characterized people whose gender does not match the sex on their birth certificate as “making a false claim.” Gender identity, the order states, is not “a replacement for sex” and “does not provide a meaningful basis for identification.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Pete Marocco, Who Helped Gut Foreign Aid for Trump, Leaves State Department

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      Pete Marocco, who worked with Elon Musk’s team to oversee the gutting of foreign aid and the dismantling of the main U.S. aid agency, has left the State Department, administration officials said on Monday.The abrupt departure comes in the middle of the department’s efforts to merge the remnants of that aid group, the U.S. Agency for International Development, into the department by mid-August.Mr. Marocco had been acting as the head of foreign aid at the department and would have overseen the remaining aid operations, which amount to only a fraction of those active before President Trump took office.Mr. Marocco is expected to take another job in the administration, U.S. officials say.The State Department did not provide official comment on Mr. Marocco’s departure. But a statement from the department’s press office that was attributed to a “senior administration official” praised Mr. Marocco for finding “egregious abuses of taxpayer dollars” during his tenure. The statement provided no examples of such abuses.Mr. Marocco’s critics said they planned to continue scrutinizing how he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have gutted foreign aid.“Pete Marocco’s tenure brought chaos to U.S.A.I.D., reckless and unlawful policy to the State Department, and dismantled longstanding U.S. foreign policy,” Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, said in a statement, adding, “His actions deprived millions of people around the world of lifesaving aid and jeopardized U.S. credibility with our partners.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s Use of Immigration Law Appears to Conflict With Limits Imposed by Congress

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      A crackdown targeting foreign students protesting Israel’s treatment of Palestinians conflicts with free-speech protections that lawmakers added in 1990.The Trump administration is asserting that it has broad power under a 1952 law to kick out foreign students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests. That statute says the secretary of state can deem noncitizens deportable for foreign policy reasons, and the secretary, Marco Rubio, made clear recently that he had already used it to cancel hundreds of student visas.“It might be more than 300 at this point,” Mr. Rubio said last week. “We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.”But that expansive conception of power appears to conflict with a key limit Congress added nearly four decades after the law passed. Lawmakers explained that the modification, which is recorded elsewhere in federal statute books, means the law may be used “only in unusual circumstances” and “sparingly” if the problem stems from foreigners’ exercise of free speech.Lawmakers also gave two examples of when deporting someone under the 1952 law over speech would still be legitimate. Both scenarios, laid out in a report explaining the 1990 bill that enacted the restriction, were highly exceptional.The first was if a particular foreigner’s mere presence in the United States would somehow violate a treaty. The other was if it “could result in imminent harm to the lives or property” of Americans abroad, like when allowing the former shah of Iran to come to the United States in 1979 led to a riot at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and a hostage crisis.The additional guardrails raise questions over what rights foreign students are entitled to and underscore the Trump administration’s far-ranging interpretation of its authority in aggressively moving to deport those who have protested Israel’s war in Gaza. The executive branch has broad discretion to deny visas to applicants while they are abroad. But once noncitizens are on American soil, they are protected by the Constitution, which includes the rights to free speech and due process.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More