One afternoon in April, the staffers of The Minnesota Daily student newspaper gathered in a lecture hall for a meeting.

The all-staff gathering focused on safety and privacy, according to Tyler Church, a reporter at the University of Minnesota student newspaper. Staffers discussed how to better protect the newspaper’s sources — and also how staffers could better protect themselves from potential retaliation over their work.

“There was a lot of tension in the air at that meeting,” said Church, a rising junior. “Nervousness for what the future looks like for us as reporters.”

To Church, that meeting underscored the challenging atmosphere that has enveloped him and his colleagues since President Donald Trump was sworn in for a second time and began waging a war on higher education. It also fostered a sense of solidarity among the staffers, according to Church.

“We realized that all of us are in it for the long haul, and we’re all committed to this,” he said.

Student journalists do real journalism, but college reporting is often also considered a training ground of sorts — an opportunity for students to learn how to report.

But over the past few months, student journalists across the country have found themselves on the front lines of some of the most headline-grabbing stories as the Trump administration cuts federal grants to universities that don’t bend to its will and immigration officials detain scores of international students.

Situated at the nexus of the White House’s assaults on both higher education and media freedom, these reporters have been grappling with tough questions over source and author anonymity, journalist safety, online harassment and the role of student journalism in Trump’s America. Their age belies the significance of their work, multiple of them said.

For many of these reporters, the stakes have never been higher, the responsibility heavier, the pressure more intense.

“It does definitely feel like a trial by fire,” Church said. Based on interviews with nearly one dozen student journalists around the country, Church isn’t the only student reporter who feels that way.

Several student journalists point to the April detention of Rümeysa Öztürk — a Turkish Ph.D. student at Tufts University — over a campus newspaper op-ed as a major flashpoint that clarified just how precarious the situation was.

The current environment “is unlike anything that I’ve ever seen,” said Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel at the Student Press Law Center, or SPLC, who has worked at the organization for more than three decades. “The amount of bravery and courage that we are asking of our youngest journalists is pretty daunting,” he added.

In April, an SPLC-led coalition issued a Student Media Alert highlighting threats to free speech on college campuses. It also said that March 2025 saw a 39% increase in requests to the SPLC Legal Hotline compared to March 2024.

In the wake of Öztürk’s detention, editors said they began receiving requests from international students to remove their bylines from op-eds out of fear that the articles could be used to justify their detention or deportation. Others asked for their op-eds to be deleted entirely.

It’s a question that Sophia Perrault has faced since Trump’s inauguration. The rising senior at the University of Michigan served as co-editor of the editorial pages at The Michigan Daily newspaper during this past spring semester.

“We would discuss, if this is a situation in which we think that there’s a threat to someone being able to stay here and finish their education, we would grant anonymity,” said Perrault, who is now serving as the newspaper’s summer editor-in-chief.

These concerns have extended to international student reporters as well, according to Perrault. The Daily is considering ways it can better protect its international staffers from potential retaliation over their work, she said.

Meanwhile, at Columbia, which has been at the epicenter of Trump’s attacks on universities, a sense of fear has become the norm for some journalists, especially visa holders, according to Claudia Gohn, who is graduating from Columbia Journalism School this spring.

One student journalist at Barnard College, an affiliate of Columbia, faced what appeared to be university attempts to threaten her graduation after she reported on a pro-Palestine protest for Columbia’s radio station WKCR, the Columbia Journalism Review reported .

In some cases, these reporters have covered the detentions of their fellow students. One evening this spring, Church learned that an international student at the University of Minnesota had been detained by immigration authorities.

Church immediately jumped into action. “I pretty much dropped everything,” he said, and drove about 30 minutes north of campus to a detention center where he suspected the student was being held in hopes of getting answers.

Even stacked up against what has been a chaotic year of reporting, that moment stands out for him. “As a reporter, I want to do anything that I can in my power to figure out these situations,” Church said about his reporting efforts.

For some reporters, it’s natural to think about their college journalism experiences as pre- and post-Trump, they said.

“There’s totally a clear divide,” said Josie Reich, a reporter at The Yale Daily News who spent the past few months covering how the Yale president’s office has responded to the Trump administration.

“Everything that we write about has huge national implications,” Reich said. “The stakes have totally risen, and so there totally feels like a greater heaviness — or more importance — to the work.”

That’s something other student newspapers are contending with as more student journalists become de facto Trump administration reporters.

“We don’t have a Trump administration beat, but functionally that’s what many of our reporters are,” said Jared Mitovich, former editor-in-chief of The Daily Pennsylvanian at the University of Pennsylvania.

Despite the challenges, several reporters also said they recognize they’re in a unique position, primed to report on how Trump administration policies are directly impacting schools and the students who study at them.

“Student journalism is really rising to the forefront right now because national outlets can cover what’s happening, but they can’t get in the head of these students,” Perrault said.

Some student reporters are clocking dozens of hours in the newsroom each week — typically for no money, and all while balancing classes, and sometimes jobs and other extracurricular activities.

And while the beginning of the Trump era of student journalism has brought greater pressure, it has also brought a sense of deep responsibility and commitment to the news.

“All the national news I’m reporting on in my backyard is what has hooked me on journalism,” Reich said.