In 2025, much of my professional focus has been on small colleges in the United States. But as many of you know, my colleague and Edu Alliance co-founder, Dr. Senthil Nathan, and I also consult extensively in the international higher education space. Senthil, based in Abu Dhabi, UAE—where Edu Alliance was founded was asked by a close friend of ours, Chet Haskell, about how the Middle East and its students are reacting to the recent moves by the Trump Administration. Dr. Nathan shared a troubling May 29th article from The National, a UAE English language paper titled, “It’s not worth the risk”: Middle East students put US dreams on hold amid Trump visa crackdown.
The article begins with this chilling line:
“Young people in the Middle East have spoken of their fears after the US government decided to freeze overseas student interviews and plan to begin vetting their social media accounts. The directive signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and sent to diplomatic and consular posts halts interview appointments at US universities.”
The UAE, home to nearly 10 million people—90% of whom are expatriates—is a global crossroads. Many of their children attend top-tier international high schools and are academically prepared to study anywhere in the world. Historically, the United States has been a top choice for both undergraduate and graduate education.
But that is changing.
This new wave of student hesitation, and in many cases fear, represents a broader global shift. Today, even the most qualified international students are asking whether the United States is still a safe, welcoming, or stable destination for higher education. And their concerns are justified.
At a time when U.S. institutions are grappling with enrollment challenges—including a shrinking pool of domestic high school graduates—we are simultaneously sending signals that dissuade international students from coming. That’s not just bad policy. It’s bad economics.
According to NAFSA: Association of International Educators, international students contributed $43.8 billion to the U.S. economy during the 2023–2024 academic year and supported 378,175 jobs across the country. These students fill key seats in STEM programs, support local economies, and enrich our campuses in ways that go far beyond tuition payments.
And the stakes go beyond higher education.
A 2024 study found that 101 companies in the S&P 500 are led by foreign-born CEOs. Many of these executives earned their degrees at U.S. universities, underscoring how American higher education is not just a national asset but a global talent incubator that fuels our economy and leadership.
Here are just a few examples:
Jensen Huang: Born in Taiwan (NVIDIA) – B.S. from Oregon State, M.S. from Stanford
Elon Musk: Born in South Africa (Tesla, SpaceX) – B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania
Sundar Pichai: Born in India (Alphabet/Google) – M.S. from Stanford, MBA from Wharton
Mike Krieger: Born in Brazil (Co-founder of Instagram) B.S. and M.S. Symbolic Systems and Human-Computer Interaction, Stanford University
Satya Nadella: Born in India (Microsoft) – M.S. from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, MBA from the University of Chicago
Max Levchin: Born in Ukraine (Co-founder of PayPal, Affirm), Bachelor’s in Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Arvind Krishna: Born in India (IBM) – Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Safra Catz: Born in Israel (Oracle) – Undergraduate & J.D. from University of Pennsylvania
Jane Fraser: Born in the United Kingdom (Citigroup) – MBA from Harvard Business School
Nikesh Arora: Born in India (Palo Alto Networks) – MBA from Northeastern
Jan Koum: Born in Ukraine (Co-founder of WhatsApp), Studied Computer Science (did not complete degree) at San Jose State University
These leaders represent just a fraction of the talent pipeline shaped by U.S. universities.
According to a 2023 American Immigration Council report, 44.8% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children, including iconic firms like Apple, Google, and Tesla. Together, these companies generate $8.1 trillion in annual revenue and employ over 14.8 million people globally.
The Bottom Line
The American higher education brand still carries immense prestige. But prestige alone won’t carry us forward. If we continue to restrict and politicize student visas, we will lose not only potential students but also future scientists, entrepreneurs, job creators, and community leaders.
We must ask: Are our current policies serving national interests, or undermining them?
Our classrooms, campuses, corporations, and communities are stronger when they include the world’s brightest minds. Let’s not close the door on a future we have long helped build.
Dean Hoke is Managing Partner of Edu Alliance Group, a higher education consultancy. He formerly served as President/CEO of the American Association of University Administrators (AAUA). With decades of experience in higher education leadership, consulting, and institutional strategy, he brings a wealth of knowledge on international partnerships and market evaluations.
Hundreds of UCLA students protest in support of Palestinians on May 2, 2024.
Credit: Christine Kao
A critical presence persists across the dozens of university campuses nationwide where students have organized demonstrations in support of Palestinians: student journalists reporting for their school newspapers, at times providing round-the-clock coverage and, increasingly, doing so under threats of arrest and violence.
“They recognize that the eyes of the world are on college campuses and they can be a lens through which people can see what’s happening,” said Christina Bellantoni, director of the Annenberg Media Center at USC.
Student journalists are central to the reporting of historic national protests calling for universities to divest from companies with military ties to Israel and for a ceasefire in Gaza.
“We have a job to do as student journalists. I like to say we’re not student journalists, we’re journalists,” said Matthew Royer, national editor and higher education editor at the Daily Bruin, UCLA’s student newspaper.
At some schools that have shut down access to nonstudents, like USC, a private institution, student journalists are the only regular source of news on campus grounds. And at schools where journalists from outside news organizations are present, like UCLA, student journalists have remained top producers of the most accurate, up-to-date information.
A post by Matthew Royer from The Daily Bruin at UCLA.
The Daily Bruin had such high readership this week that its site was down for several hours Wednesday, requiring the newsroom to extend the site’s bandwidth.
This week at UCLA, a group of four student reporters were verbally harassed, beaten, kicked and pepper-sprayed by a group of pro-Israel counterprotesters who that night had attacked the on-campus encampment for hours.
A police officer grabs a protester by the back of their jacket to stop him from moving toward the encampment on May 2, 2024. Credit: Brandon Morquecho / Daily Bruin Photo Editor
At least one of the reporters, Catherine Hamilton, went to the hospital with injuries after the violent assault.
“Truly, there’s not much time for us to recover. As the new day starts, we have to be prepared for anything to happen,” Hamilton said in an interview with CNN. She returned to her reporting post shortly after being released from the hospital.
Royer confirmed that UCLA had promised journalists a safe room that night, but “the doors were locked, and they weren’t given access by the hired UCLA security.”
UCLA has not responded to a request for comment.
In a statement Thursday, UCLA Chancellor Gene Block said the violence on campus “has fractured our sense of togetherness and frayed our bonds of trust, and will surely leave a scar on the campus.”
His statement made no reference to the assault on journalists.
“I think it’s our jobs to continue to do what we can in the safest manner possible,” said Royer, who said counterprotesters have yanked his press badge, blasted megaphones near his ears, and blocked his camera over multiple days while reporting.
Student journalists nationwide have also been threatened with arrest by police arriving on campus to clear student encampments.
“We train these students to put safety first,” said Bellantoni. “What I cannot guarantee is that they won’t be arrested in this. If they are arrested, I can guarantee you those charges will not stand and we will make sure that we fight that because journalists have a right to be there and a right to witness it.”
A man wearing a jacket that reads “Anti Genocide Social Club” records a livestream of a line of CHP officers between Royce Hall and Haines Hall on May 2, 2024.Credit: Brandon Morquecho / Daily Bruin Photo Editor
Protests in support of Palestine are nothing new on UC Berkeley’s campus, according to Aarya Mukherjee, 19, who has covered campus activism and the encampment as a student life reporter for months at The Daily Californian.
But when he heard Daily Bruin reporters were assaulted, he said he “felt for them.”
“Last night, there was a very good chance of a raid. … So we were kind of preparing for the same thing to happen to us,” Mukherjee said, noting that the campus has been generally peaceful with little hostility toward the press. “It’s honestly scary, but … we accept that risk. We just hope it doesn’t happen.”
Given UC Berkeley’s history of protest and constant stream of student activism, managing editor Matt Brown said Daily Cal reporters are uniquely prepared to cover events that may turn violent. For years, guidelines on staying safe have been passed down through the organization’s editors.
“Everybody’s always in pairs. Everybody’s always taking shifts. Everybody’s always communicating. Nobody goes out there without a press pass,” Brown said.
Free Palestine encampment at UC Berkeley on April 29, 2024. Credit: Kelcie Lee / EdSource
The Daily Cal published an editorial late Wednesday that expressed solidarity with reporters at The Daily Bruin. It also condemned UCLA for failing to protect campus journalists.
“Everybody was on board; and within about an hour, we had a draft,” Brown said.
“We condemn the attackers and any attempt to stifle student coverage,” the editorial read. “It is the community’s duty to safeguard the students who are putting themselves in harm’s way to keep them informed.”
Many have also collaborated across campuses, a sign of their understanding that they hold a powerful position. The Daily Trojan, the Daily Bruin, the Emory Wheel, The Daily Californian, Washington Square News (NYU), the Berkeley Beacon (Emerson College) and the Daily Texan (UT Austin) joined forces to produce a compilation of photos of protests at their respective campuses.
‘That’s our Achilles’ heel’
Mercy Sosa, 22, received a tip that protests were starting at Sacramento State University on Monday at 6 a.m.
As editor-in-chief of The State Hornet, she got to work. By 6:30 a.m., she was on the scene — and continued to report on developments at the encampment for the next two days despite upcoming final exams.
“The amount of walking I did, the amount of not sleeping that I did — it’s exhausting,” Sosa said. “But I felt like it was my duty to be there and to make sure that students knew what was going on. And this isn’t just a Sac State story: This is a national story. … I couldn’t just turn a blind eye.”
The campus announced the encampment could remain intact until May 8. Unlike at other campuses, student reporters at Sacramento State haven’t faced aggression from campus or other stakeholders. The environment, Sosa said, has been mostly peaceful, with some counterprotesters and few police.
It’s similar at Sonoma State University, where Ally Valiente’s team at the Sonoma State Star are covering their growing student encampment.
But the current calm hasn’t made it easier for them to stomach the violence that played out at UCLA.
Daily Bruin homepage on May, 1, 2024.
Daily Bruin homepage on May, 2, 2024.
“It sort of makes me scared this could actually happen to any campus,” said Valiente, news editor.
Being a member of student media, where reporters and protesters can interact student-to-student, has played a key role in developing trust with sources, who are sometimes classmates, according to Chris Woodard, a managing editor at The State Hornet.
It’s a unique level of access that Brad Butterfield leaned into while reporting for Cal Poly Humboldt’s The Lumberjack, along with his knowledge of campus grounds.
Not all reporters covering Humboldt’s protests understood “how complex our campus is,” he said, which impacted police when it came to “gaining control.”
They also often work alongside journalists from other publications, who at times forget they are students.
Woodard recalled being in line for an interview by the encampment alongside a half dozen reporters from other publications.
“I kind of went up to all the other publications like ‘Hey guys, if you can please do me a favor and let me do the next interview? I have to go to class,’” Woodard said.
“I could tell this by the reaction of all the other professional journalists they’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s a thing for you.’”
They let him go ahead — and he made it to class 20 minutes late.
Mukherjee and his Daily Cal colleagues are taking shifts to cover the protests and encampment, sometimes reporting in the field for 24 hours straight in the days leading up to final exams.
He said a relentless news cycle has made it harder to focus on school and that it is sometimes hard to separate life as a student from life as a reporter.
“Students should obviously be studying, hitting the books,” Mukherjee said. “Because of the constant news, we feel as though … we have a responsibility to report that, kind of, almost supersedes our due diligence as students.”
Others, like The Lumberjack’s Butterfield, did not attend class once protests began.
“Because I am a journalism major, I think that’s important to note: I don’t feel like I’m missing out too much on what’s happening in my classes because I’m out in the field doing what I’m going to school to learn how to do,” said Butterfield, 26. “When there’s a massive and important story on our campus to cover, at least my professors have been pretty lenient in understanding that that does take its priority in a lot of ways — and I’ll catch up on my work at some point in the next week or two.”
With local newsrooms growing sparse, Sosa said student press has become increasingly important in filling that void of local coverage for both the campus and larger community.
But in communities like Humboldt, student coverage is sometimes nonexistent over the summer.
“I think that’s our Achilles’ heel, when the semester ends a lot of folks kind of go their own separate ways, especially here in Humboldt County ’cause there’s so little jobs,” said Butterfield.
Woodard also said that “it’s hard to bear that pressure” for being at the forefront of national reporting as a student.
“You’ve become the No. 1 news source for the biggest story in the country. But at the same time, we have finals next week,” said Woodard, 30. “It’s like, which one do I take more pride in?”
A few days ago, he said he sat on the floor of his apartment and cried.
The toll, he said, can be especially difficult on editors — who are not only going to school and contributing to coverage, but also managing teams of their peers and classmates, often in their late teens or early 20s.
“Being an editor of student media and being an editor in real media are two very, very different things,” Woodard said. “For all the student editors out there that are dealing with this: I hope everyone just gives them a hug.”
The Fresno Unified school board on Friday appointed Misty Her, the district’s deputy superintendent, to lead the district on an interim basis while the board conducts a national search for someone to fill the permanent role.
The decision came after closed-session discussions at a Monday meeting and during special board meetings about the interim position on Wednesday and Friday.
As interim superintendent of California’s third-largest district, Her becomes the nation’s highest-ranking Hmong education leader and brings stability that the district needs, board members said at the news conference after Friday’s meeting.
Her appointment, which becomes effective on Wednesday when her contract is approved, allows Fresno Unified to “maintain momentum” without rushing the search process, board President Susan Wittrup told reporters.
“We need an interim superintendent who will continue to implement the important initiatives that the district is pursuing and who will ensure that we are fully prepared for the first day of school in the fall,” Wittrup said.
The school board said on April 10 that it would consider both internal and external candidates in the search for a new superintendent — a change in the search process that was spurred by weeks of community outrage.
The outrage followed a March 20 closed-session decision to interview internal candidates before deciding how to proceed with the search process. Details of the 4-3 decision were leaked to the media, sparking community anger that pushed the board to reverse course on April 3 and postpone already scheduled interviews.
After the April 10 decision, the search process was supposed to include community participation with the board providing additional updates at other meetings. Although board members met on April 24 for a regularly scheduled meeting, the board president didn’t disclose a timeline in a seemingly stalled process, The Fresno Bee reported.
Superintendent Bob Nelson announced his resignation on Jan. 22; his last day is July 31. The school district confirmed in a media release about Nelson’s resignation that Her would be named interim superintendent, but naming her on Friday is a move that most likely won’t restore community trust, according to Fresno Teachers Association President Manuel Bonilla.
“The FUSD school board continues to erode community trust with its handling of the superintendent search process,” Bonilla said in an emailed statement following the announcement. “The board’s decision to announce the appointment of Interim Superintendent Misty Her during the Friday News Dump period, following two abnormally scheduled special meetings that effectively sidelined public input, undermines transparency and further erodes community trust in the superintendent selection process.”
So far, the search process has been engulfed in community angst about an alleged lack of transparency and accusations that the process had been tainted by politics, EdSource reported. District employees at the center of the search, including Her, even faced racial harassment and threats.
Reflecting on the last few weeks, board member Elizabeth Jonasson Rosas said on Friday that the board is now where it needs to be — united to find its next superintendent who can advance student achievement. Most Fresno Unified students failed to meet the state standards in 2023.
The district leaders did not answer questions at Friday’s news conference but will host another one Wednesday before the board’s regularly scheduled meeting.
“Moving forward, the board must demonstrate a commitment to inclusivity and transparency in its decision-making processes,” Bonilla said. “We urge the board to prioritize meaningful community engagement and input in the selection of the next superintendent to rebuild trust and ensure accountability to all stakeholders.”
Nelson, board members say the appointment is what Fresno Unified needs
The board’s unanimous decision to appoint Her is what the Fresno Unified community needs, district leaders said.
“There is nobody I am more confident in leading our Fresno Unified family through this transitionary period than you,” Nelson said, addressing Her, at the Friday special board meeting. “You have never apologized about your relentless focus on student achievement, and that’s what we really need at this time.”
Her’s entire 30-year career has been in Fresno Unified where she’s held many positions, including a bilingual instructional aide, a school leader and deputy superintendent in 2021.
“Most important to me,” trustee Veva Islas said, “Misty’s lived experience allows her to relate to our disadvantaged students that no other superintendent can.”
Born in a prisoner of war camp in Laos, Her’s family escaped to a refugee camp in Thailand after the end of the Vietnam War before eventually coming to the United States and settling in Fresno when she was a young child, Fresno Unified said in an emailed statement. That firsthand experience and her understanding of the challenges faced by students from diverse backgrounds have shaped her into a passionate and effective leader, the school district stated.
Based on 2022-23 state data, more than 92% of Fresno Unified students are minorities, and according to 2023-24 district data, 88% of students are living in disadvantaged circumstances.
The school board, which has yet to lay out a timeline, share a job description for the next superintendent or select another search firm to lead the search, will update the community about the national search at its May 8 meeting.
The board is “committed and unified” to not only find the next superintendent but to support Her in the meantime, board members said.
“Fresno Unified is my life. From elementary school through more than three decades as an employee and a current Fresno Unified parent, my commitment runs deep,” Her said in the district’s statement.
“I am proud to serve our students and their families as one of their own,” she said. “Our Fresno Unified family deserves a leader who is a successful Fresno Unified graduate, is committed to this community and truly believes in our students and staff.”
Oliver Darcy is a media expert who reports on the media at his blog called Status. He here writes about the unwarranted jubilation of rightwing pundits who believe that their relentless attacks on Biden’s cognition were correct after all. This turns out to be a useful topic for them right now as Trump is hoovering up all the cash he can handle from his profitable dealings in real estate, bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and other lucrative deals.
When you compare the two, it’s clear that Biden’s presidency was unblemished by corruption or scandal. The unemployment rate was low, inflation was dropping, and relationships with our allies in Europe, Canada, Mexico, and Asia were strong. The Economist said that the American economy was “the envy of the world.”
Now we are locked, as Rahm Emanuel wrote in The Washington Post, in a state of chaos, corruption, and cruelty. Every government agency has been ripped apart by Elon Musk’s DOGS, and our democracy is turning into an imperial presidency. Trump has assembled a Cabinet of billionaires and FOX News personalities. From day to day, we wonder which government responsibility will be cast aside.
I don’t know what Biden’s mental state was. But I liked his government far more than Trump’s cruel autocracy.
Darcy writes:
For years, right-wing media pushed a warped narrative of Joe Biden as a brain-dead puppet controlled by sinister, shadowy forces. Now they’re demanding vindication—but they do not deserve it.
Over the last week, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book, “Original Sin,” has landed with a flurry of attention-grabbing headlines—not just for the reporting, but for what Tapper has said during the press tour. In an interview with Megyn Kelly on Tuesday, Tapper declared that “conservative media was right and conservative media was correct” about Joe Biden’s mental state.
But that’s not quite true. Or rather, it simplifies a much more nuanced media and political reality. While it’s fair to argue that the press should have covered Biden’s age with greater urgency—and to acknowledge that Biden clearly lost a step during his presidency—that’s a far cry from validating the deeply irresponsible narrative right-wing media spun for years: that the president of theUnited Stateswas a mentally incapacitated puppet with dementia, unaware of his own surroundings, and propped up by a “shadow government” running the country in his name.
That was never journalism. It was propaganda. Full stop.
Since the early days of the 2020 campaign, MAGA Media figures—particularly on Fox News—lobbed increasingly absurd claims about Biden’s mental faculties. They painted him as a senile old man who didn’t know what day it was, who couldn’t walk unaided, and who spent his presidency dozing off while Barack Obama or Ron Klain or some other shadowy liberal elite force secretly ran the country behind closed doors.
This wasn’t grounded in evidence. It wasn’t the result of deep reporting or careful observation. It was pure narrative warfare—an attempt to delegitimize Biden not just as a candidate but as a commander-in-chief. And the coverage became so cartoonish at times that no amount of fact-based reporting about Biden could pierce the right-wing media bubble.
None of this is to deny that Biden was aging. He was. By the end of his term, it was obvious to those around him—and to many voters—that he lacked the energy he once had. Even Democratic operatives privately acknowledged that he didn’t have his fastball anymore. But there’s a world of a difference between an 80-something president, who has always been prone to gaffes, showing his age and a man secretly suffering from debilitating dementia or worse. And conflating the two, as Fox News and its allies routinely did, wasn’t just misleading—it was malicious.
Yes, Biden’s debate performance on CNN was troubling. Yes, the press should have been more aggressive in scrutinizing his capacity to serve a second term. But reporters who refrained from joining the right-wing media hysteria were not negligent or part of a cover-up—they were simply cautious. They understood the weight of diagnosing a president with a serious neurodegenerative disorder without hard evidence. And they understood the cost of being wrong, particularly asDonald Trump ran on an authoritarian-like platform that he is now implementing in office.
MAGA Media’s goal was never honest diagnosis. It was political demolition. They weaponized Biden’s verbal gaffes, his slower gait, and his lower-energy demeanor to manufacture the idea that he was mentally vacant. Never mind that Biden managed the job without the chaos and confusion that has markedTrump’s second term. No matter what Biden did—whether it was biking, traveling, or delivering speeches—the same echo chamber smeared him with the same predictable attacks.
That wasn’t journalism. It was performance. And it came from people like Kelly and Sean Hannity, who weren’t doing reporting at all. They weren’t gathering facts. They were throwing mud, hoping some of it would stick. And in many corners of the country, it did.
That’s what makes the current revisionism so maddening. Now, with Tapper and Thompson’s book pointing to Biden’s visible decline, MAGA Media figures are claiming vindication. They’re demanding apologies from journalists who didn’t amplify their dementia narrative—insisting, once again, that they were “right all along.”
It’s reminiscent of how right-wing media rewrote history around Robert Mueller’s Russia probe or the COVID-19 pandemic: flattening complexity, cherry-picking facts, and pretending their worst-faith speculation was truth from the start.
But they weren’t right. They were irresponsible. They didn’t try to understand what was happening behind the scenes—they invented a version of it that was politically convenient. And just because Biden aged, and struggled in the final days of his presidency, doesn’t make their years of bad-faith character assassination suddenly noble. Notably, while they maligned Biden, they let Trump—a man prone to deranged rants and wild conspiracy theories—off the hook entirely.
Biden didn’t have a perfect presidency, and his age became an unavoidable liability. But he was not an empty shell of a man, either. He governed. He made decisions. He passed legislation. And he did it while under constant attack from a media machine that acted not as a watchdog—but as an attack dog.
More than 20 years ago, California passed a law allowing some undocumented immigrant students to attend college with in-state tuition, if they meet certain requirements.
But immigrant rights advocates say many students who should have been eligible have been wrongfully denied in-state tuition because of confusion over requirements, misinformation and different interpretations of the law at different college campuses.
“We lose that incredible brain power and colleges are losing enrollment,” said Nancy Jodaitis, director of higher education for Immigrants Rising, a nonprofit organization that advocates for undocumented people to achieve educational and career goals.
Immigrants Rising brought together officials from all three public college systems — California Community Colleges, California State University and University of California — to discuss and agree on answers to frequently-asked questions about the law.
The result is a document called the Systemwide AB 540 FAQ, which all three systems have now signed. The document includes answers to 59 questions, such as:
What if a student graduated from a California high school (completing three years’ worth of high school credits), but did not attend three years at a California high school?
Does a student have to take classes full time for their attendance to count?
Does all their coursework have to be taken at the same school?
Spokespeople from UC, CSU and California Community Colleges all celebrated the document.
Paul Feist, vice chancellor of communications and marketing for the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, said the document is particularly important because there are several different laws regarding the nonresident tuition exemption.
The first bill exempting some undocumented immigrants from out-of-state tuition, Assembly Bill 540, was signed into law in 2001. Since then, three other bills have been passed to expand the law, in 2014, 2017 and 2022.
“While the intent was to expand access to AB 540 financial assistance, they had the unintended effect of making it more difficult to navigate,” Feist said. “This FAQ is designed to provide clearer explanations and provide additional resources in advising students.”
Under current California law, students who are undocumented or have temporary protection from deportation such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), or who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents, are eligible for in-state tuition and state financial aid, if they attended at least three years of high school, adult school or community college in California and obtained a high school diploma or equivalent, an associate degree or fulfilled the minimum requirements to transfer to a UC or CSU.
Access to state financial aid and in-state tuition can be a critical factor for undocumented students, who are barred from receiving federal financial aid. Without the law in place, some of them would be charged tuition rates for international students, often much higher than in-state tuition.
“This is huge,” said Maria Gutierrez, a college counselor at Chabot College in Hayward and a doctoral student at San Francisco State University. “It helps us be aligned and have something in writing.” Before the FAQ document, Gutierrez says college staff in charge of approving exemptions from out-of-state tuition were sometimes afraid to make decisions without written proof of how to interpret the law.
Gutierrez herself has benefited from AB 540. She came to the U.S. when she was 5 years old on a visa, which later expired. She attended elementary, middle and most of high school in California. She also graduated from high school in California. But when she applied to attend community college in California, different campuses disagreed on whether she was eligible for in-state tuition because she had spent two years of high school in Utah. At the time, a second law had recently been passed to allow colleges to consider years of attendance in elementary and middle school for AB 540 eligibility.
“One college that I went to in So Cal, I was approved for AB 540. When I had to go back to the Bay Area, I was not approved for AB 540. So then I was confused that there was this inconsistency,” Gutierrez said.
A few years later, when she applied to transfer to a four-year college, both UC and CSU campuses told her she was not eligible for in-state tuition, even though by then, a law had passed that clarified that attendance at community college could be counted toward the requirements. She spent a semester paying out-of-state tuition at San Jose State University, before the university finally acknowledged she was legally eligible for in-state tuition.
As a college counselor, Gutierrez continues to meet students who have been incorrectly told they are not eligible for in-state tuition.
“It’s crazy because in reality it hasn’t changed much,” she said. However, she said, the financial burden is harder now, because most students graduating from high school cannot apply for work permits under DACA, because the government has not accepted new applications since 2017.
“I see my students now and I see the struggles they’re going through. If I didn’t have DACA, I honestly don’t think I would be where I am now,” Gutierrez said. “There’s no way that I would’ve been able to pay nonresident fees or wait for whoever it is that is determining that to learn what they need to do for me to be able to go to college.”
Advocates say they hope the document will help colleges give correct information and avoid students having to research on their own for information.
California also recently streamlined the process for undocumented students to apply for financial aid and exemption from in-state tuition on the same application when they fill out the California Dream Act application. In the past, students had to both fill out a California Dream Act application and an AB 540 affidavit form for each college. Now, the AB 540 form will be part of the same application.
Diana Aguilar-Cruz said that change is significant. Aguilar-Cruz is currently pursuing a master’s degree in public health at Cal State Fullerton. When she first began her undergraduate education at Cal Poly Pomona, she was charged nonresident tuition, which was almost double the in-state tuition. She had immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico City in 2015, when she was 14 years old, and lived with her grandmother in Baldwin Park while attending high school.
She had completed a California Dream Act application, but no one told her she also had to complete a separate form. After researching it herself online, she found the form and completed it, at which point the university finally changed her tuition to in-state.
“If I didn’t find it in my Google search, would I be paying in-state tuition for my four years of college?” Aguilar-Cruz said. “I always think to myself, what would have happened if I was a more fearful student or a student who did not have a strong support system at home?”
This article was corrected to clarify how Maria Gutierrez immigrated to the U.S. and that Chabot College is in Hayward.
Piedmont seventh graders participate in the global strike for climate change in San Francisco in 2019.
Credit: Andrew Reed/EdSource
I live on the coast of California, near the Point Reyes National Seashore. In February 2023, we endured an abnormally violent storm with 60 mph wind gusts that brought down a large redwood tree onto two cars parked in my driveway. I was shaken but grateful to be alive. I was also grateful for the generosity of my neighbor who allowed me to borrow her car for the next two weeks as I sorted things out.
When the time came to return the borrowed car, I made sure to wash it, clean it out and return it with a full gas tank. I recalled hearing my father’s voice telling me to always return something you borrowed in better shape than when you got it.
I realize that my generation of baby boomers has essentially “borrowed” and used the planet for our own purposes for the past 50 years. And now it is time for us to return what we borrowed — and turn it over to the next generation.
Fifty years of population growth, industrial expansion, carbon burning and general lack of care has initiated a process of climate change that is generating a multitude of physical, economic and social crises. We are trying to mitigate these changes, but no matter how well we do that, we will nonetheless be turning over the planet to the next generation with irreparable damage done and in a state of accelerating decline.
So what else can my generation do?
I think our generation owes it to the next generation to prepare them as well as we can for the world they will face. If we cannot return the earth to them in good shape, we can at least give them a powerful education so that they can survive — and do better than we have done — when it is their turn to assume stewardship of the planet.
Preparing our children for the world they will inherit is the right thing to do — for them and for us. But it also could be very good for the California education system. Preparing students for the world they will inherit could help schools find renewed purpose and achieve the relevance that students are demanding.
In 2015, California published its Blueprint for Environmental Literacy. The document points out that K-12 students in California do not currently have “consistent access to adequately funded, high-quality learning experiences, in and out of the classroom, that build environmental literacy.” Many receive only a limited introduction to environmental content, and some have no access at all.
Why has so little changed in our schools over the nine years since the blueprint was published?
One answer is that the state has not made environmental or climate change education a priority, nor has it invested in long-term, well-crafted initiatives to develop the capacity and propensity of the educational system to change itself. The state does relatively little to develop the curriculum, assessments and professional development that is required to create learning opportunities that can help students prepare for a world dominated by climate change.
Over the next five years, California is planning to invest about $10 billion a year to combat the effects of climate change. By contrast, the state presently invests less than 0.1% of this amount to support the development of climate change education.
This means that for every $100 the state spends fighting climate change, it spends less than 1 cent on educating its students to understand the need for those efforts.
For every student in California, we spend over $20,000 a year on their school education. Of this amount, we devote less than $2 per student annually to develop our capacity to promote climate change literacy.
The Covid pandemic provides a clear example of what happens when investment in science and investment in education are not well-balanced. The nation succeeded in creating vaccines that were successful at fending off the worst effects of this new Covid virus. However, the lack of public understanding of vaccines, and in the science behind them, severely limited their timely adoption and success.
The same is true with climate change. In the long term, we will not be able address climate change without an equal emphasis on climate change education.
California is taking the lead in the nation in supporting policies and research that fight climate change. It could do the same with climate change education.
We very much need the next generation to be smarter and wiser than mine. This is not just my generation’s idea of what is good for our youth. They are already demanding of us that we do better in terms of mitigation, adaptation and education. Can we look them in the eye and honestly say to them that we are doing everything we can do to prepare them for what is coming?
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Mark St. John is founder of Inverness Research, a nonprofit organization that studies education initiatives, and a consultant to Ten Strands, a nonprofit organization promoting environmental literacy for California students.
The opinions in this commentary are those of the author. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
A multi-ethnic group of elementary age children are playing with blocks in class at their desks.
Credit: Christopher Futcher / iStock
Audacious, multimillion dollar scandals by two California charter school operators within the past decade exposed vulnerabilities to fraud resulting from inept and negligent oversight and inadequate auditing. A pair of inquiries into those weaknesses have concluded that several dozen actions could help spot, address and potentially deter future attempts by charter school operators to evade state laws and regulations.
The other is by the Anti-Fraud Task Force of the California Charter Authorizing Professionals, a nonprofit association for school districts and county offices of education. Its report reminded legislators and policymakers what’s at stake in failures of oversight: “Every theft of funds from our public schools not only harms the students, but also undermines public confidence in our public education system.”
A third and final report, concentrating on auditing reforms, will be released before June 30 by a multi-agency task force. Chaired by state Comptroller Malia Cohen, it was commissioned by San Diego Superior Court Judge Robert Longstreth, who presided over a jaw-dropping case of financial abuse.
That case involved the now-defunct virtual charter school network A3 Education, which thrived because of a total breakdown of accountability systems. Its founders, Sean McManus and Jason Schrock, pleaded guilty in 2021 to a conspiracy to commit theft of public dollars, extracting $400 million in attendance-based state revenue, much of it based on phantom enrollments. They siphoned at least $50 million to a company they owned while promising services to students that were never provided. In return for serving four years on house arrest, the executives pledged to repay $37 million.
A3 operated 19 charter schools approved by small school districts in a half-dozen counties that relied on the 1% to 3% in annual fees to balance their budgets. Collectively, the fees produced millions of dollars. The districts didn’t supervise effectively, because they lacked the capacity, expertise and, in some cases, motivation to hold charter schools accountable.
Big revenue for a tiny district
Among them is Dehesa School District, with 84 students and one school in the San Diego County foothills. It chartered three A3 schools. Dehesa’s former superintendent was the only superintendent of the 11 people indicted in the A3 scandal.
Dehesa also granted charters to two schools for Inspire Charter Schools, the other suspected perpetrator of large-scale fraud. Inspire, a home-school charter network with a dozen schools in multiple counties with, at one point, 24,380 students, directed 15% of its more than $100 million income to a corporation created by its founder, Herbert “Nick” Nichols III.
Inspire enticed families to enroll by awarding $2,600 per student to spend on academic enrichment activities of their choice, including annual passes to Disneyland and Big Air Trampoline Park.
An audit by FCMAT found that the records of financial expenditures and transfers of money from school to school, all run by Nichols’ central office, were so poorly kept and hard to track that FCMAT couldn’t prove fraud or other illegalities — although the deficiencies in recordkeeping increased the likelihood of them, the audit said. Nichols, who received $1,056,000 in advance pay, agreed to pay it back in a severance agreement in 2019 but declined repeated requests to speak with FCMAT, according to the audit.
A3 and Inspire may have committed the largest-scale fraud, but they weren’t the only cases of embezzlement and probably won’t be the last. Last week, Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, who chairs the Assembly Education Committee, and Josh Newman, D-Fullerton, who chairs the Senate Education Committee, requested approval of a state audit of a charter school and related operations after whistleblowers told Sacramento TV news channel ABC10 about suspected fraud, waste and abuse of public funds. The audit would include examining oversight of the district authorizer, Twin Rivers Unified.
The employees of Sacramento-based Highlands Community Charter School asserted problems that include falsified student attendance numbers, cronyism and misuse of public funds for luxury gifts for staff and students, staff bonuses, and political contributions. Highlands Community Charter enrolls adult immigrant students for career and technical courses and English language instruction.
Reports by both LAO-FCMAT and the authorizers’ task force make similar recommendations for effective oversight, such as demanding that nonprofit charter school boards scrutinize third-party contracts for conflicts of interest and annual financial audits. In return for authorizers doing more work, the LAO-FCMAT report would raise their fees to 3% of a charter school’s Local Control Funding Formula revenue.
The LAO-FCMAT report calls for limiting small school districts’ ability to authorize charter schools with enrollment no larger than the district’s own. It suggests creating a new entity to approve and oversee all-virtual charter schools, which currently must seek multiple distinct authorizers in many counties, complicating coherent oversight.
The task force calls for establishing a statewide Office of Inspector General, perhaps under the state Attorney General, to investigate and prosecute financial fraud in school districts, community colleges and charter schools. The office would have the power to issue subpoenas and prosecute.
Demand more of charter authorizers
Past attempts to legislate reforms broke down amid contention between school districts and charter schools’ advocates. But David Patterson, a founding member and now president of the California Charter Authorizing Professionals, said he’s optimistic that collaborative work over two years will resolve disagreements.
He said the bulk of recommendations would not require statutory or regulatory changes and could be adopted immediately. They’d involve creating a fraud risk management program for all charter schools and charter management organizations, as well as district and county authorizers. Elements would include regularly training charter school board members and fleshing out expectations and statutory obligations for authorizers which, Patterson acknowledged, are “outmoded and insufficient.” Even some of the small authorizers “that everyone wants to pick on, deservedly so, probably met minimal requirements” under the state’s 30-year-old charter school law, he said.
There also would be clear procedures for filing complaints of suspected fraud, including a statewide hotline, Patterson said. Currently, there are no formal channels for reporting suspected fraud. Jeff Rice, founding director of APLUS+, which advances personalized learning models for 91 member charter schools in California, said he called out Inspire for the Disneyland passes, and others complained to authorizers and county offices about illegal enrollment practices, to no avail, he said.
‘The San Diego County District Attorney’s Office charged A3’s founders and administrators with defrauding the state by inflating tuition revenue by purchasing children’s personal information from private and public schools and then enrolling them without families’ knowledge. FCMAT suspected Inspire did something similar by manipulating enrollments in a multitrack attendance schedule.
Eric Premack, executive director of the Charter Schools Development Center in Sacramento, a veteran charter school adviser and advocate, put the blame on auditors and authorizers for not detecting the fraud.
“Even the smallest authorizer spending 20 minutes in the school could have and should have found this. If it’s a brick-and-mortar school, go visit at least a couple of classrooms,” he said. “And if there’s no students in the classroom and no teaching going on, you know you have a problem. In an independent study program, go in, look at the enrollment list. And then say, ‘I want to see this kid’s work.’”
Both reports suggest improvements in the auditing process.
Charter school audits are not required to extensively examine enrollment and attendance records. The LAO-FCMAT report would require an auditor to flag for the board and authorizer any monthly variation in enrollment or attendance numbers exceeding 5%.
Sampling records and transactions for compliance is critical to detecting discrepancies. The standard practice is for the auditor to choose what should be sampled. But the LAO-FCMAT report said that in recent cases of fraud, the school had provided the sample. The report calls for mandating that the auditors choose.
Charter schools must choose an auditor from a state-sanctioned list. But there’s no requirement that auditors have any expertise in doing school audits. That would change. Auditors on the state list would be required to take regular training in school financing and regulations.
The anti-fraud task force and LAO-FCMAT reports focused on non-classroom-based charters because that’s where cases of fraud, including A3 and Inspire, have largely been concentrated. Non-classroom-based charters are defined as schools in which less than 80% of instruction occurs in a classroom.
Contrary to widespread belief, few of them are strictly online schools, as the LAO and FCMAT discovered. About a quarter of the state’s 1,200 charter schools are non-classroom-based, serving 38% of charter school students. Post-COVID, the combination of hybrid schools and home-based schools that spend part of the week in school facilities is a fast-growing sector of schools. Most report they offer no virtual instruction or are primarily classroom‑based.
Classification as a non-classroom-based charter imposes a set of requirements to qualify for full funding. Class sizes can be no larger than 25 to 1; schools must spend at least 40% of their revenue on certificated teachers and staff and 80% of their budget on instruction.
In a recommendation that surprised and pleased most charter advocates, the LAO-FCMAT report recommends narrowing the definition of non-classroom schools to those offering less than 50% instruction in a classroom. Schools would be able to count facilities expenses as part of instruction, and qualify for after-school funding that other schools receive.
“We question whether a whole bunch of charter schools should have to go through the funding determination process,” said Mike Fine, FCMAT’s CEO. “The name non-classroom-based charter school is a misnomer for many schools that don’t have a virtual component, have a robust facility (operation) and a cost structure that isn’t any different from any other school.”
In 2019, the Legislature imposed a two-year moratorium on passing new non-classroom-based charter schools, and has twice extended it. The moratorium expires in 2026.
Fine said the idea behind the LAO-FCMAT report was to air issues and propose solutions in order to avoid another moratorium extension. “Come next year,” he said, “this will provide a foundation for a starting point of a discussion.”
Michael Elden-Rooney wrote in Chalkbeat about the arrest and detention of a public high school student in New York City, which has spurred protests on the student’s behalf. He was attending a school for students learning English. His earnings after school were devoted to helping his mother and two younger siblings move out of a shelter and into an apartment. He entered the country legally. Mayor Eric Adams, who is indebted to Trump for pardoning him, has remained silent.
Attorneys for Dylan, 20, a native of Venezuela, made several moves Thursday they hope will slow, and ultimately stymie, the government’s efforts to fast-track his deportation following his arrest last week by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents after a routine court date.
Dylan is the first known current New York City public school student to be detained by immigration authorities in President Donald Trump’s second term. In the days following Chalkbeat’s Monday report on Dylan’s arrest, his case has become national news and galvanized local efforts to oppose Trump’s immigration policies, including a rally Thursday on the steps of the city’s Education Department headquarters in lower Manhattan.
Dylan’s attorneys from the New York Legal Assistance Group, or NYLAG, filed a “habeas corpus” petition late Thursday night in federal court in Western Pennsylvania, where Dylan is being held, arguing that immigration officials violated his due process rights by preventing him from making full use of the court system. They assert that Dylan is ineligible for “expedited” deportation because he had legal permission to enter the country under a Biden-era humanitarian program.
Dylan’s arrest was part of a nationwide enforcement blitz where government lawyers move to dismiss migrants’ immigration cases, allowing authorities to arrest them on the spot and thrust them into a fast-tracked deportation process with fewer legal protections.
Officials from the Department of Homeland security did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the new legal petition. They previously criticized former President Joseph Biden’s policy allowing migrants like Dylan to enter the country and said “ICE is now following the law and placing these illegal aliens in expedited removal, as they always should have been.”
For the first week of his detention, Dylan’s lawyers could not reach him because he was shuttled so rapidly between four different states, according to a NYLAG spokesperson and his mother, Raiza, whose last name is being withheld at her request to avoid retaliation.
His lawyers finally managed to make contact Wednesday morning — just in time to prepare him for an interview with an asylum officer about whether he has a “credible fear” of returning to Venezuela — a hurdle Dylan must clear to avoid immediate deportation.
The interview took place early Thursday morning, with no advance notice to Dylan’s lawyers. They were only able to get a lawyer patched into the interview after Raiza alerted them shortly before, according to one of the attorneys….
“Dylan’s arrest and ongoing detention cause him enormous and continued harm,” the filing alleges. “He has been ripped away from his high school studies, his work, and his mother and young siblings who rely on him.” The full-time student at ELLIS Prep, which caters to older newly arrived immigrants, has also been working part-time as a delivery worker, helping his mom and two younger siblings move out of a shelter and into their own apartment.
His attorneys argue that Dylan’s arrest and detention have curtailed his ability to access the court system — a violation of the due process rights guaranteed to anyone in the U.S., regardless of immigration status. In addition to his asylum claim, Dylan is applying for Special Immigration Juvenile Status, a type of legal protection for youth under 21 who can’t be reunited with both parents (his father passed away years ago), according to the petition.
Dylan was scheduled to have a hearing in family court for that case Friday morning but was unlikely to be able to attend from detention — endangering his case, according to his attorneys.
The lawyers argue that Dylan was never eligible for “expedited removal” in the first place, since the procedure is not meant for people who were “admitted or paroled” into the country like Dylan was, according to federal immigration law.
Adding to the urgency of the situation is the fact that Dylan is facing severe gastrointestinal issues that doctors were still trying to diagnose when he was detained. “These specialists are currently in the process of assessing whether Dylan’s symptoms are the result of cancer or [Crohn’s] disease,” and recommended an “immediate in-person follow up appointment,” the filing states...
Meanwhile, Dylan’s case has continued to pick up public attention. An online fundraiser that launched Wednesday to help Dylan’s mom with expenses related to his legal case and caring for her two younger children had collected more than $27,000 by Friday morning.
And hundreds of supporters — including elected officials and city schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos — rallied outside of the Education Department’s downtown Manhattan headquarters calling for his release.
Chants of “Free Dylan” echoed through the crowd of teachers union members, immigration advocates, students, and anti-Trump protesters.
“Dylan is a student, a worker, and part of our community. He did everything right, and still, ICE tore him away from his life and family in New York,” U.S. Rep. Nydia Velasquez said in a statement, the second federal elected official to publicly challenge Dylan’s detention.
Members of UTLA and SEIU Local 99 rally outside of Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters on May 7, 2024.
Credit: Delilah Brumer / EdSource
Thousands of Los Angeles Unified School District teachers and employees took to the street outside the district headquarters on Tuesday to demand an end to what they describe as the “Carvalho cuts,” referring to the superintendent.
Members of both United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) and SEIU Local 99, which represents roughly 30,000 workers in LAUSD, anticipate staffing and program cuts in the upcoming academic year, despite Los Angeles Unified having roughly $6.3 billion in its reserves.
“We’re out here making sure the district hears us and funds our positions properly,” said Conrado Guerrero, the SEIU Local 99 president, who has served as a building engineer in LAUSD for 27 years.
“We’re so understaffed,” he said outside a district board meeting on Tuesday. “We’re being overworked, and they’re underpaying us. After a while, you just become a robot from working and don’t have time to be with your family.”
UTLA also claims in a news release that the district has failed to set aside enough money to keep its current staffing and services and is instead planning to “reclaim an unprecedented portion of ‘carryover funds’ that schools rely on to address budget shortfalls.”
Amid declining enrollment, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho told The 74 in an interview in December that LAUSD was implementing a targeted hiring freeze and may have to consider consolidating or closing some of its schools as pandemic aid funds run dry.
“Los Angeles Unified is committed to prioritizing investments that directly impact student learning and achievement,” an LAUSD spokesperson said in a statement to EdSource on Tuesday. “We are exploring a multi-faceted approach that combines fiscal responsibility with strategic resource allocation.
“We will protect our workforce and the historic compensation increases that were negotiated, and we will protect programs for our students.”
If the cuts take place, union members fear these positions, among others, could be at risk:
special education assistants
campus aides
school supervision aides
pupil services
attendance counselors
psychiatric social workers
school psychologists
library aides
IT and tech support staff
Art and music teachers
The unions have stated that on top of reducing students’ access to services such as mental health and special needs support, the cuts will also lead to messy or dirty classrooms and larger class sizes.
Support for programs like the district’s Black Student Achievement Plan, community schools and English language learner programs could also take a hit, they say.
Cheryl Zarate, an eighth grade teacher at Thomas Starr King Middle School, said she found out about the cuts from her school principal and immediately felt “devastated.”
Thomas Starr King Middle School alone could lose as many as six campus aides, two counselors, school climate advocates, custodians and an assistant principal, Zarate said. School psychologists, she added, will no longer be available every day — and will only be on campus twice a week.
These cuts, Zarate said, would have a particularly negative effect on students with disabilities and those who are struggling with mental health challenges.
“It scares me and the other educators to know that we have middle school students who go through mental fatigue and anxiety and, God forbid, have suicidal ideations,” Zarate said.
“Are we supposed to schedule out when a student is going to have a mental breakdown?”
Zarate added that LAUSD should be focused on keeping and supporting the staff, not prioritizing other initiatives such as the diagnostic assessment tool called iReady and its newly launched AI tool, Ed.
“All these projects … are not relevant to what we asked and fought for, which is a full-time staff … mental health, safety, a greener campus for our students,” Zarate said.
“That’s what we deserve. That’s what the students deserve.”
Amid a sea of UTLA red and SEIU purple, the rally’s participants shook tambourines, waved pompoms and chanted “stop the cuts.”
Among them was William Chavez, a social science teacher at Wilson High School, who has worked in LAUSD for a decade.
“We’re sending a clear, unified message to the superintendent and the school board that these deep cuts are unfair and unjust,” Chavez said. “We’ll all have to wear more hats. We’ll have to do even more work, and something’s got to give, and that really hurts the students.”
Delilah Brumer is a sophomore at Los Angeles Pierce College majoring in journalism and political science and a member of EdSource’s California Student Journalism Corps.
I wrote a post about this case a week ago. A scientist at Harvard, who left Russia as an anti-war dissenter, was detained at Logan Airport in Boston on her return from France because she had scientific samples that she did not declare. The samples–frog embryos on slides–posed no danger to anyone. She was immediately stripped of her visa, arrested, and sent to Louisiana to await deportation. A federal judge just granted her bail.
I recall that Trump campaigned on a pledge to deport rapists, murderers, “the worst of the worst.” This young woman is a scientist who is working to find the causes of cancer. Why does he want to deport her?
“There does not seem to be either a factual or legal basis for the immigration officer’s actions” in stripping Ms. Petrova of her visa on Feb. 16, Christina Reiss, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Vermont, said in a court hearing.
The judge said the available evidence suggested that the samples Ms. Petrova carried into the country were “wholly non-hazardous, non-toxic, non-living, and posed a threat to no one.” She also said that “Ms. Petrova’s life and well-being are in peril if she is deported to Russia,” as the government has said it intends to do.
Unlike other high-profile deportation cases involving academics, Ms. Petrova’s began with a customs violation. Returning to Boston from a vacation in France, she agreed to carry back samples of frog embryos from an affiliate laboratory at the request of her supervisor at Harvard Medical School.
When the samples were discovered during an inspection of Ms. Petrova’s baggage at Logan Airport, the customs official canceled her visa on the spot and started deportation proceedings. She was transferred to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Louisiana, where she remained for more than three months.
“This is kind of a circular process, because it was the government that revoked her visa,” Judge Reiss said on Wednesday. “And it’s essentially saying, ‘We revoked your visa, now you have no documentation and now we’re going to place you in removal proceedings.’”
She concluded that “what happened in this case was extraordinary and novel,” and that if she did not take action in the case “there will be no determination” that Ms. Petrova’s constitutional rights had been violated.
“Bail is necessary to make the habeas remedy effective in this case,” she said.
However, it is unclear when the government will allow Ms. Petrova’s release on bail, or whether it will pursue its plan to deport her to Russia. The case has attracted high-level attention from officials in the Trump administration, who took an unusual step earlier this month, after Judge Reiss indicated she planned to release Ms. Petrova.
Hours after that hearing, the Department of Justice unsealed felony smuggling charges against Ms. Petrova based on her failure to declare the scientific samples, and Ms. Petrova was arrested and transferred to the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service in Louisiana, where she remains.
Ms. Petrova’s next opportunity for release will come after she is transferred to Massachusetts to face the smuggling charges. But the government also issued a detainer on immigration charges, raising the possibility that, if a judge grants her bail in the criminal case, the government could ask ICE to detain her once again.
Judge Reiss asked Jeffrey M. Hartman, the attorney representing the Department of Justice at the bail hearing, whether that would happen.
He said he did not think so, citing the recent releases of Mohsen Mahdawi, a student organizer at Columbia University, and Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts University.
“My understanding of the Ozturk and Mahdawi cases is that the government has not re-detained those noncitizens, and I would expect the government to adhere to the same course of action,” Mr. Hartman said.
Ms. Petrova, 31, the graduate of an elite Russian physics and technology institute, was recruited in 2023 to work at a laboratory at Harvard Medical School studying the earliest stages of cell development. The Kirschner Lab, where she worked, is exploring ways to repair damage to cells that lead to diseases like cancer.
Ms. Petrova has admitted that she failed to declare the samples. Her lawyer has argued that this would ordinarily be treated as a minor infraction, punishable with a fine.
When Ms. Petrova told the customs officer that she had fled Russia for political reasons and faced arrest if she returned there, she was transferred to ICE custody to wait for an asylum hearing, a process that can take months or years.
