US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has pledged to revoke additional international student visas as part of a clampdown on disruptive pro-Palestinian protests.
Hundreds of students have already been stripped of their US visas and targeted for deportation for their involvement in last year's on-campus protests against the war in Gaza.
The Trump administration claims protesters are anti-Semitic or Hamas sympathisers, and in several cases pro-Israel groups have provided the names of protesters to the government.
Mr Rubio, who has previously described protesters as “lunatics”, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he had asked for details about students who took part in a recent protest. He did not say which one, but may have been referring to demonstrations this month at Columbia University in New York, where dozens of people were arrested.
“I asked, please can you find the arrest records of all the people that were arrested at that riot at that campus, because if any of them have a visa, we're going to revoke it,” Mr Rubio said.
When asked in a later hearing how many student visas had been revoked, Mr Rubio estimated the number to be in the thousands, including in cases where a student had dropped out or committed a crime. He said the number of students who have lost their visas because of campus protests was “probably under 1,000”. In March, he said it was more than 300.
The revocation of student visas has pitted the federal government against free speech advocates, who accuse it of targeting people for expressing opinions. The Trump administration says a visa is a privilege and not a right, and says protesters are unfairly disrupting campus life for other students.
Mr Rubio's testimony was interrupted several times by pro-Palestinian protesters decrying Israel's “genocide” in Gaza. They were quickly ejected from the hearing.
Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen raised the case of Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish citizen who was targeted for deportation for co-authoring an essay that was critical of the university's response to student demands that it acknowledge the “Palestinian genocide”.
Mr Van Hollen described the targeting of students over their political views as akin to “the McCarthy-era witch hunts of the 1950s”.
“Your campaign of fear and repression is eating away [at] foundational values of our democracy,” Mr Van Hollen said.
Mr Rubio did not reference Ms Ozturk's case. He said the State Department would revoke more student visas.
“We're going to do more,” Mr Rubio said. “There are more coming. We're going to continue to revoke the visas of people who are here as guests and are disrupting our [institutions of] higher education.”
