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Trump Plans to Throw Out 3,000 Chinese Students Over Security Fears, Says Report

The White House is reportedly planning to cancel visas for any student with ties to China’s military schools.

The Trump administration is planning to cancel the visas of at least 3,000 Chinese graduate students and researchers with ties to China’s military schools, The New York Times reports. The FBI and the Justice Department have been briefing American universities for years about potential national-security threats posed by Chinese students, particularly those working in the sciences. If it goes ahead, the mass visa cancellation would be the first designed to end access to the U.S. school system for a category of Chinese students. The plan will be controversial—officials have reportedly acknowledged there is no direct evidence that the students who are about to lose their visas have done anything wrong. American officials are, instead, more concerned about the Chinese universities where the students trained as undergraduates. One official reportedly claimed that students who are allowed to go to the U.S. are expected to collect information as a condition of having their tuition paid, though didn’t provide the newspaper with any intelligence for that claim.