Ahead of President Trump’s upcoming inauguration on January 20, 2025, some universities, including Harvard, USC, and Cornell are advising their international student body to prepare to return to campus from their winter breaks before Trump is sworn in to office. The warnings are a result of Trump’s expressed desire to reimpose a travel ban previously instituted during his first term as President and ended by President Biden when he took office.
Upon his first week in office in January 2017, Mr. Trump instituted entry restrictions to the US to nationals from seven majority-Muslim countries, including Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Myanmar, Sudan, Tanzania, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, and Somalia. This time around, as Cornell University’s Office of Global Learning is warning, the ban could include “China and India.” Thousands of students could be left stranded as they were in 2017 and the fear of history repeating itself has prompted the universities to sound warning bells.