In May, Oliver Philcox returned home after Covid-19 forced all schools in the US to study online, but now he doesn't know how to go back.

Philcox, a British astrophysicist at Princeton University, is among a flurry of international students who are bewildered about the possibility of returning to the United States following a July 6 announcement by the President Donald Trump administration.

According to the notice issued by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), students in the United States will have to return home if the program they are studying will switch to 100% online teaching in the fall.

According to data from the 2019 Exchange report of the International Education Exchange, the US government's plan will affect about one million foreign students.

Many universities see this as a political move, pressuring them to reopen instead of organizing all online classes.

Some are rethinking whether it is worth it to choose to study in the US, which has a prestigious and professional education.

"In many ways, the US government made it very clear that they did not want me to come here. If that were the case, maybe I should not have come here in the first place," Gonzalez said, adding that the new decision

For some international students, the US is a "paradise" that protects them from conflict in their homeland, or provides solutions for those living in facilities that cannot support distance learning.

Ifat Gazia, a student from Kashmir, India, came to the US in August last year, after the government cut off the Internet to control tensions in a disputed area with Pakistan.

After arriving in the United States, Gazia could not even call her family to let them know that she had landed safely, because the Indian government blocked both landline and mobile phone services in Kashmir.

Indian students point out that higher education is often a way for the United States to attract highly skilled labor.

Kunal Singh, who is studying for a Ph.D in political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has no way to return to his native India, because the country closed its border in March to prevent the spread of nCoV.

"If I knew something like this would happen when I applied to American schools, I would give up that decision. Instead, I would enroll in Australia or the UK," Singh said.

Some argue that enduring financial pressures and the stress of continuing to study in the US is an unproductive trade-off.

Jaime explained that they once offered the school a discount for the next term "because the online learning experience was different from normal", but was rejected.

Many students are also starting to consider other options, such as Andy Mao, a biology student at New York University from Shanghai, China.

Mao had planned to continue studying for many more years in the United States, because it was a leading country in the field of research.

In some cases, international students have spouses or children in the US, which means the whole family has to leave according to the new rules.

Lee, who is from Trinidad and Tobago, lives with a Belgian husband and a baby boy born in the US, so he is an American citizen.

Many students are even struggling to find out if they are affected by the new policy, especially those who focus on research at higher education levels.

In March, Kelsey Bryk, a 29-year-old Canadian woman, left the University of Delaware and drove 26 hours to her home town of Winnipeg.

The University of Delaware is trying to find ways to ensure international students can stay, but the outlook remains very vague.