About 20 Chinese scholars with valid visas were recently denied entry to the United States after questioning by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel.
China's Consular Affairs office said in an April 16 post on X that the scholars recently flew through Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to attend an academic conference, and were inspected by CBP officers and ultimately turned away at the border.
It is unclear why the scholars were refused entry. NTD reached out to CBP, the Chinese Embassy in Washington, and its consulate in San Francisco for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.
Since late 2023, more than a dozen Chinese Ph.D. students at Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, and other major research institutions have been denied reentry and deported after returning from visits to China, according to a report by the academic journal Science. Some were barred from the United States for five years.
A Yale Ph.D. candidate identified only as Mr. T was held for eight hours at Washington Dulles International Airport in December 2023 and questioned about his field of study, financial aid from the Chinese government, and related topics before being told his F-1 student visa had been revoked.
A researcher at the National Cancer Institute, identified as Mr. M, faced a similar experience at Dulles in November 2023, with customs officers questioning him about his research ties to the Chinese military before revoking his visa—carried out directly by the U.S. Department of State.
In September 2025, a 22-year-old Chinese philosophy student named Gu was deported from Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport after a 10-hour interrogation spread across three sessions and a 36-hour detention. Customs officials had found on his phone that he had joined several WeChat group chats linked to the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, an organization the U.S. State Department has designated as a Chinese Communist Party-controlled entity used to monitor students studying abroad. Gu was banned from re-entering the United States for five years.
The heightened scrutiny traces in part to a May 2020 proclamation signed during President Donald Trump's first term that barred Chinese nationals with ties to China's military-civil fusion strategy from entering the U.S. on F or J visas. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced in May 2025 that the administration would begin revoking visas of Chinese students connected to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.
Seattle has one of the largest Chinese-American communities in the country. The city ranked sixth among U.S. metro areas for Chinese population in 2019, with roughly 166,000 residents, according to the Pew Research Center.