At a brunch for Stony Brook University international students, some worry about Trump's anti-immigrant statements

At this year's Thanksgiving dinner, Wading River resident JoAnn Vitale welcomed a new guest to her table: A young Stony Brook University student from India.

Vitale is part of the university's International Friends and Family Program, which pairs students from overseas with community members who volunteer to show these young people Long Island’s landscape, teach them about American culture and break bread. In the three months since she was matched with the student, she said they have visited Fire Island National Seashore and gone apple picking — both new experiences for the young woman.

“I learned a lot about her culture and she’s learning about our culture,” Vitale said. “We’ve shared holiday traditions and holiday folklore and things like that together.”

On Friday, Stony Brook students and hosts like Vitale gathered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Patchogue for a Black Friday brunch consisting of leftovers from their respective Thanksgiving feasts. While many students expressed gratitude for the opportunity to study at an American university, some hosts voiced concern at the anti-immigrant sentiment expressed by the Trump administration, especially in the wake of Wednesday's shooting in the nation’s capital of two National Guard troops. An Afghan national who worked with the CIA in his home country and was granted asylum earlier this year has been charged with first-degree murder in the shooting.

In response, President Donald Trump said he wants to “permanently pause" migration from poorer nations and remove millions of immigrants from the United States.

Vitale said she hopes the international students are "safe” and that "we welcome them.”

“I don’t think that we should stop people from other countries from coming to this country,” Vitale said. “That’s what this country was founded on, its immigrants.”

While Trump did not specifically focus on students in his announcement this week, foreign students have been targeted by his administration with visa revocations, arrests and stepped-up vetting.

In April, 11 Stony Brook University students had their visas revoked; their legal status was later restored. The State University of New York reported earlier this month that overall international student enrollment had dropped by 3.9% compared to last fall, and the number of foreign graduate students declined by 13.8%. (Stony Brook was an outlier, with a 3.8% increase in international students.)

Several students interviewed Friday asked not to be identified because they feared potential repercussions. David Hensen, who has hosted international students through the Stony Brook program for two decades and organized Friday’s brunch, said some of the students he knows have been “uptight” or “upset” by recent anti-immigrant sentiment.

"They’re competent people trying to make a better life for each other," Hensen, 69, of Miller Place, said.

As for the president's reaction to this week's shooting, he said he was “somewhat appalled” at the reaction “to blame innocent people across the board because of who they are or their ethnic background.”

Referring to the international students, he said, “They’re not responsible for what happened in Washington, D.C., with the shooting. They’re probably just as appalled as anyone, if anything more so, because the trickle-down effect is going to be on them.”