By Caroline Kimeu |Photography by Badru Katumba for WSJ
As a boy, Majok Bior escaped a country engulfed in war. As a gifted student, he won a full scholarship to Duke University and looked toward a dazzling future.
Bior studied computer science at the North Carolina campus during his freshman year and was a winger on an intramural soccer team. After finishing the fall semester of his sophomore year, Bior returned to Uganda for winter break. He played chess with friends and recounted the brutal winters and demands of chemistry class.
Then President Trump began to ban students from Africa, starting with South Sudan where Bior was born. He hasn't returned to campus since.
"You must not attempt to use your visa as it has been invalidated," said the email Bior received last year in April from the State Department. He tried the U.S. Embassy, and the consular officer told him his visa application was on indefinite hold.
The number of new and returning African students arriving in the U.S. for the 2025 fall semester fell by nearly a third from the previous year, according to preliminary Commerce Department data. Arrivals from Nigeria and Ghana, which historically send more students to the U.S. than any other African countries, dropped by roughly half.
One South Sudanese sophomore at Bates College in Maine was stopped from boarding her flight back to the U.S. the day after the ban was announced.
The U.S. hosted more than a million international students during the 2023-2024 school year , according to a survey by Open Doors, funded by the federal government. Some 50,000 of the students were from sub-Saharan Africa.
"These are the best and brightest students who are going to be great allies of the U.S. if they were to spend time there," said Rebecca Zeigler Mano, an American who promoted American universities for the U.S. Embassy in Harare, Zimbabwe.
Mano advised one Zimbabwean who went on to attend Duke, Yale and Harvard universities and is now an oncologist specializing in lung cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York . Another earned his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis, and helped develop the Covid-19 vaccine at Pfizer.
"This is the kind of talent we're shutting out," Mano said.
The U.S. welcomes "great students," according to written comments from the State Department press office, but the administration's top priority is national security and border protection. "A U.S. visa is a privilege, not a right."
In December, the U.S. expanded travel restrictions to include people from more than two dozen African nations, citing concerns about visa overstays and a need for more rigorous vetting. Since last year, diplomats have searched applicants' social-media posts for messages that oppose Trump administration policies or views.
On Jan. 14, the administration indefinitely paused processing of immigrant visa applications for 75 countries worldwide.
Officials from State University of New York at Oswego visited Kenya last year and complained to American diplomats that around nine of 10 African students admitted to the school can't attend because they were denied visas.
"The uncertainty of the visa process really hurt us, and also the general perception that the U.S. may be less welcoming," said Joshua McKeown, the university's director of international education. "The worst thing would be if students in the future don't even bother to apply."
Boy soldiers
Trump's displeasure with South Sudan began when it refused to accept a man being deported by the U.S. The man was Congolese, South Sudanese officials said, but the administration didn't want to take no for an answer. The State Department revoked visas held by South Sudanese and stopped issuing new ones. South Sudan's foreign ministry declined to comment on the travel ban.
South Sudan finally agreed to take the disputed deportee, but the U.S. left the visa ban in place anyway. The South Sudanese have lived with worse.
In the 1950s, the south of Sudan -- populated mostly with black Christians and animists -- fought two long wars to try to break away from the Khartoum government, which was controlled by northern Arab-Muslim political elites. The discovery of oil in southern Sudan in 1978 stoked the violence.
South Sudan won its independence in 2011, but then plunged into its own civil war, largely along ethnic lines. Fighting continued to consume the country when Bior's family sent him to Uganda as a refugee, hoping to keep the 12-year-old boy safe and in school. Both government forces and armed groups routinely enlisted children to fight.
After a few months in the refugee settlement, Bior moved in with relatives in Kampala, Uganda's capital. He returned to South Sudan as a teenager and graduated with honors from one of its most competitive high schools.
At Duke, he had maintained good grades and hoped to qualify for medical school. He found a welcoming community in a Christian student organization .
When U.S. visas were revoked last year, many South Sudanese students believed the issue would be quickly resolved. Nearly three dozen of them joined a WhatsApp chat group to share updates. As the visa refusals piled up, some began to fear their American college dreams were vanishing. As fall semester began, panic and then despair set in.
With no prospects for a U.S. visa, Bior enrolled in a Duke study-abroad program in Germany for the fall 2025 semester. He took courses in computer science, art history and German language. He couldn't take enough classes to meet his pre-med requirements and worried about falling behind.
After finishing the program in December, Bior arrived in Uganda at 3 a.m., exhausted and anxious. He was excited to see relatives but knew his chances of soon joining his Duke classmates were slim. "I'm really missing out," he said.
A Duke spokesman said the university couldn't discuss individual cases. "We provide comprehensive support to help our international students navigate U.S. immigration policies," he said.
In Kampala, Bior competes in chess tournaments and volunteers with the Dongriin Foundation, a nonprofit which helps refugee students find college-prep help and scholarships at local universities. Bior, who began volunteering with the foundation after high school, lobbies sponsors for scholarship programs, and helps students with college admissions. His family remains in South Sudan, where the fighting has flared.
"What if he doesn't go back? What will happen to him?" said Rachel Adau, the wife of Bior's cousin. She said the uncertainty weighs on Bior, who logs on to his State Department visa tracker often, hoping for a miracle.
No appeal
Bior visited with a friend in Kampala one afternoon in December. His friend, a 23-year-old sophomore politics major at Bates College, was trapped in the same visa freeze.
They laughed at the ups and downs of American campus life. She talked about her first night out with her Californian roommate and the culture shock of seeing students wearing shorts to class and their public displays of affection. She recalled dissolving into tears when she was kept from boarding for her return flight to the U.S.
In low moments, she has considered giving up on an American education and getting married, the path taken by most of her high-school friends. Bior talked her out of it.
With help from Duke, Bior had secured a spot for the spring semester at a college in Dublin in another study-abroad program. But he couldn't get an Ireland visa in time, forcing him to miss another semester.
Trump's expanded travel ban in December coincided with college early-decision notifications.
Wiseman Makore, a 19-year-old Zimbabwean, learned of the U.S. travel ban days before he was offered a full scholarship at Harvard University, starting this fall. He fears he will never see the Cambridge, Mass., campus.
Aspiring electrical engineer Tanatswa Mbara, a 20-year-old from Zimbabwe, received a scholarship to start this fall at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. He woke his mother when his acceptance notice arrived at 1 a.m.
The December travel ban was announced hours later. "To know that it may all have been in vain is heartbreaking," Mbara said.
Yousra Hassan, a 20-year-old from Burundi, a French-speaking country in East Africa, won a scholarship to North Central College in Naperville, Ill., after 18 months of intensive English study. She turned down a scholarship to the American University in Beirut in favor of North Central and had found housing and a roommate.
While waiting in line last June for her visa interview at the U.S. Embassy in Bujumbura, Burundi, she watched anxiously as applicant after applicant left dejected. When her turn came, the consular officer handed her a letter citing a Trump presidential proclamation on national security threats. "Today's decision," the letter said, "cannot be appealed."
"I had prepared for a denial," Hassan said, "but seeing those words in writing felt like a punch in the heart."
In August, she pored over online photos of the orientation week she missed at North Central's campus, 8,000 miles and a visa away -- "a reminder of the life I was preparing for," she said, "but couldn't get to."
In a last-ditch effort to get back to Duke, Bior obtained a special refugee passport, issued by Uganda, that he hopes will allow him to bypass the South Sudan visa ban. "I don't know if it'll work," he said. "If it doesn't, I may be cooked."
Write to Caroline Kimeu at caroline.kimeu@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 24, 2026 21:00 ET (01:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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