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New DHS visa caps
The Trump administration finalized rules through the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that cap how long foreign students, cultural exchange visitors and journalists can stay in the United States on F, J and I visas.
“The administration of United States President Donald Trump is putting new time limits on visas for foreign students, exchange visitors and journalists, ending a decades-old system that let many of them stay in the US for as long as they remained in school or on assignment”
DHS said it was eliminating what it called a “duration of status loophole” that allowed these visa classes to “remain in the United States indefinitely without routine government oversight”.
Under the new final rule, F visas for international students would be capped at four years, while I visas for journalists would be limited to 240 days and 90 days for Chinese nationals, with the rule taking effect 60 days after publication in the Federal Register, subject to congressional review.
The rule also shortens the time foreign students have to leave the country or find a job from 60 to 30 days, and it requires visa holders who want to stay beyond their fixed admission period to apply to DHS for an extension or leave and seek readmission.
DHS said the prior approach meant holders of F, J and I visas were admitted for the duration of the approved programme or assignment, rather than a shorter fixed period, leaving their entry records without an explicit expiration date.
Criticism and legal pushback
The changes drew criticism from immigration studies director David Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute, who said the new approach was “just a manufactured issue and with a sledgehammer solution that just imposes crushing regulatory burdens on a far greater number of people.”
Bier also argued that the rule would leave international students with “just 30 days to find an employer to sponsor them or immediately be turned into illegal immigrants,” warning that “Have these people no understanding of how life works?”
In a separate critique, the Committee to Protect Journalists called the move “the behavior of a backsliding democracy,” and France 24 with AFP reported Reporters Without Borders (RSF) told AFP it was “outraged” over the limitations.
DHS said the open-ended system had undermined its ability to monitor visa holders, and the department framed the change as a response to a “significant increase in the volume of such visitors” that it said posed “a challenge to DHS’s ability to monitor and oversee these non-immigrants while they are in the United States.”
The DHS rule received close to 22,000 public comments after being proposed in August 2025, and it was finalized largely unchanged, according to France 24 with AFP.
Numbers, oversight, and next steps
DHS justified the fixed-term approach by pointing to scale and monitoring challenges, saying it recorded more than 1.8 million student visa admissions in 2024, an increase of more than 11% from the previous year.
“Student visas cannot exceed four years, another twist by the Trump administration against those coming from abroad”
The department also said the United States issued visas to more than 500,000 exchange visitors and 37,300 members of the media during fiscal year 2024, which began on Oct. 1, 2023, and it cited examples of students and exchange visitors remaining for decades under the existing system.
DHS said visa holders wishing to remain beyond their fixed admission period would need to apply to DHS for an extension or leave the country and seek readmission, and it said the effective date is 60 days from publication in the federal register, subject to congressional review.
The State Department said in January it had revoked 8,000 student visas, and the News of the United States reported that the changes have led to a decline in the number of student visas issued, including an 18% drop in September 2025 compared with September 2024, according to an analysis of the department’s data from the Niskanen Center.
Cecilia Esterline of The Niskanen Center warned that placing time limits on the visas “wouldn’t be a problem if U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services could process the newly required applications on time,” adding that USCIS had “had a pretty abysmal performance” in recent months.
