MORGANTOWN — West Virginia University on Thursday said it is continuing to “work directly” with a number of students and graduates whose international visas have been revoked recently by the federal government — but would not discuss what such a process might entail.

The university is keeping the identities of the involved students confidential.

“At this point, we’re not able to provide specifics beyond this,” spokeswoman Shauna Johnson said in an email confirming the revocations.

To date, three students and three alumni on the downtown campus have been affected, Johnson said, along with three more students at the WVU Institute of Technology in Beckley.

That includes the revocation of their student visas and termination of their records through the federal Student and Visitor Information System, or SEVIS, as the network is commonly known, Johnson said.

Each person programmed into SEVIS came back with the same message, she said: “Name found in criminal records check.”

The action in Morgantown and Beckley is part of a national sweep across campuses nationwide that began with last month’s arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder and Columbia University graduate student who led protests at his school last spring.

Then, the mission was to target students involved in pro-Palestinian activism or speech.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio last month, in fact, vowed the administration would continue to be relentless in targeting, in his words, “these lunatics,” so deemed by the White House as threatening U.S. foreign-policy interests through their protests.

However, as colleges and universities are now telling the Associated Press, that national net has apparently taken a wider cast.

More schools are seeing visas stripped from international students who have no known connections to such protests — but may have, say, a traffic violation on their record which then be cited to pull the academic credential.

There’s a difference between persecution and watching out for the best interests of the U.S., said Michelle Mittelstadt, director public affairs at the Migration Policy Institute.

“What you’re seeing happening with international students is really a piece of the much greater scrutiny that the Trump administration is bringing to bear on immigrants of all different categories,” she said.