HANOVER — The Trump administration’s promise to deport millions of foreign nationals who it says are in the U.S. illegally has reached into the Upper Valley as two individuals associated with Dartmouth College have had their visas terminated, leading one of them to sue the Department of Homeland Security to challenge his deportation.

Homeland Security has offered no explanation — either to the affected individuals or college officials — about why it terminated their visa status.

Xiaotian Liu, a Chinese national studying for a doctorate in computer science at Dartmouth, filed a lawsuit this week through the New Hampshire chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, arguing that his due process rights were unlawfully denied when his F-1 visa student status was terminated, exposing him to detention or deportation by authorities.

Liu, 26, a graduate of Wake Forest University in North Carolina who has been at Dartmouth since 2023, received an email from college officials last week informing him that his student visa status had been suddenly revoked by the Department of Homeland Security without warning or explanation, according to the lawsuit filed in federal court in New Hampshire.

The visa of a second, unidentified individual at Dartmouth was also terminated, according to the college.

“We are alarmed by the Trump administration’s sudden revocation, without any notice or stated explanation, of student visas and status at universities across the country, including our client here in New Hampshire,” Gilles Bissonnette, legal director of the ACLU of New Hampshire, said. “No administration should be allowed to circumvent the law to unilaterally strip students of status, disrupt their studies, and put them at risk of deportation.”

The two at Dartmouth are among hundreds of foreign national students around the country, including at Harvard, Stanford and state universities in California, Massachusetts, Colorado, Texas, Oregon and Minnesota, who have reported that they have received notice in recent days that they are no longer legally allowed to be in the U.S.

Emails to the Department of Homeland Security and its various subsidiary immigration enforcement agencies seeking comment received no response on Tuesday.

In an email to the college community on Monday, Dartmouth Provost David Kotz, said that the college “at this time” is aware “of two such record terminations within the Dartmouth community” revoking the right of individuals to study and work in the U.S.

The college’s Office of Visa and Immigration Services (OVIS) is communicating with both individuals and helped them to connect with “legal and other sources of support,” he said.

About 20% of Dartmouth’s approximately total 7,000 students are designated “international.”

The college’s published 2028 class profile says that 14.2% of students are “foreign citizens,” while 16% are classified as “international.”

Kotz said that Dartmouth’s OVIS staff discovered the record terminations during a “proactive check of the database,” which they are conducting multiple times each day. The college was never “notified of the change” of the two individual’s status, he said.

OVIS, in an email to Dartmouth’s international population, said it appeared so far “terminations and revocations are limited in number” and in “most cases schools and impacted individuals have not received notification of these actions and have learned of them instead by schools checking the database of the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System.

(The database is an online government portal run by Homeland Security to track status of students in the U.S. under the F-1 student visa and other programs).

If a student is notified by the State Department that their visa or student status has been revoked, OVIS urges them to contact their OVIS counselor “right away” in order to verify the information and affirm it is “not a scam email sent in an effort to exploit this situation.”

“OVIS is working with senior leadership at Dartmouth as well as our outside immigration counsel and our professional associations and networks and will provide updates as the situation evolves,” Dartmouth said.

The ACLU’s Bissonnette said they have no information as to why Liu was targeted, noting in their lawsuit that he “has not committed a crime, let alone a crime, in the U.S.” Moreover, Liu has not participated in any protest in the U.S. “or elsewhere,” and graduated with a master’s degree from Wake Forest with a 4.0 grade average.

Liu’s lawsuit was prepared in conjunction with attorneys from Manchester law firm Shaheen & Gordon.

“These indiscriminate government actions have real-life consequences. The people affected are not just ‘case numbers,’ they are real people with real families, real colleagues, real employers, real fellow congregants and others, all of whom feel the acute pain of these inexplicably arbitrary and indefensibly inhumane decisions,” Ronald Abramson, a partner at Shaheen & Gordon, said in a news release.

Liu’s attorneys argue in their lawsuit that Liu’s F-1 student status was unlawfully terminated and his due process rights denied because “the government is required to provide him with an advance notice and a meaningful opportunity to respond.”

The lawsuit states further that the government is “required to have grounds in order to terminate a student status, and that revocation of an F-1 visa is not sufficient ground to terminate student status.”

The F-1 visa and F-1 student status are different things: the former refers to the documents foreign students receive to enter the U.S.; the latter refers to the student’s immigration classification.

To terminate student status, the ACLU said, the student must fail to take full courses of study, engage in unauthorized employment, or be convicted of a violent crime.

None of those situations exist in Liu’s case, Bissonnette emphasized.

In an interview with the Valley News on Tuesday, Bissonnette reiterated that Liu does not understand why he was targeted.

“We have no concept why this is happening to him. That’s what’s so concerning. You’re dealing with an individual who’s been at Dartmouth since September 2023. All he is trying to do is comply with the rules, comply with the law, and be the best student he possibly can be to get the degree that he’s been working on for so long,” said Bissonnette, calling the government’s unexplained action “needlessly cruel.”

Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.