The Trump administration has reinstated the student visas of thousands of international students studying in the United States who reportedly had minor or dismissed legal infractions.
The federal government told congressional committees on April 10 that it had terminated more than 4,700 immigration status records from the International Student Exchange and Visitor Information System (SEVIS), causing widespread fear and confusion across hundreds of U.S. colleges and universities with some students opting to leave the country pre-emptively.
The Justice Department announced the reversal Friday in U.S. district court after weeks of scrutiny by courts and the filing of hundreds of lawsuits by students who feared deportation, USA Today reports. More than 40 emergency orders were also filed by judges who deemed the mass termination to be illegal. Some judges expressed frustration with the purported unwillingness of government lawyers to say whether the students could continue to attend classes or needed to leave the country immediately, according to Politico.
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Many students who sued said their schools blocked their ability to continue taking classes or conducting research.
“Some of these are PhD students. I’ve got one person that’s a lawyer in Philadelphia, you know, these are really top students, top people, and their lives are being thrown no into limbo, but into existential hell,” said attorney Brian Green, who is representing dozens of students challenging their SEVIS terminations. “They’re having to call their parents overseas, people are borrowing money from family and neighbors to afford these lawsuits just to get back to what they were entitled to have in the first place.”
ICE Developing New Policy for International Student Visa Termination
DOJ said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is working on a new policy regarding foreign students studying in the United States on F-1 visas. Until the policy is developed, no students will have their online SEVIS records terminated “solely based on” criminal history checks that had flagged misdemeanor charges and dismissed cases. Many of the impacted students appeared to have participated in political protests or had previous criminal charges, such as driving infractions. Earlier this year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio also canceled the student visas of dozes of international students he alleged were disrupting U.S. foreign policy through pro-Palestine activism.
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“ICE is developing a policy that will provide a framework for SEVIS record terminations. Until such a policy is issued, the SEVIS records for plaintiff(s) in this case (and other similarly situated plaintiffs) will remain active or shall be reactivated if not currently active, and ICE will not modify the record solely based on the NCIC finding that resulted in the recent SEVIS record termination,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Carilli read from a written statement during a hearing in D.C. federal court. “ICE maintains the authority to terminate a SEVIS record for other reasons, such as if the plaintiff fails to maintain his or her nonimmigrant status after the record is reactivated or engages in other unlawful activity that would render him or her removable from the United States under the Immigration and Nationality Act.”
Under federal regulations, F-1 status may ordinarily only be terminated on the basis of a conviction for a crime of violence with a sentence of a year or more.
