The Trump administration on Friday reversed course on the revocation of visas for international students, making an abrupt — if temporary — 180 on a policy that left more than a thousand foreign students scrambling and civil rights experts sounding the alarm about free speech.
At a hearing in the Northern District of California in Oakland, the Justice Department said visas for international students have been restored while it works up a new framework to review and cancel student visas, NBC News reported.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is developing the new policy for status record termination, said U.S. attorney Elizabeth D. Kurlan during the hearing. Until that framework is in place, foreign students’ visas will not be terminated based solely on the government’s criminal records database, as was previously the case.
ICE, however, still has the authority to terminate international students’ records for other reasons, “including if a student fails to maintain their nonimmigrant status after it is reactivated, or engages in unlawful activity that would render them removable from the U.S. under the Immigration and Nationality Act,” Kurlan said.
The administration’s decision to terminate student visas for many foreign students — a decision that appeared to be linked in some cases to political activism or minor infractions like DUIs — was met with intense pushback in the courts. Some students said they were informed of the sudden change in status and ordered to “self-deport” with little notice, and colleges said they were given little to no information or reason for the revocations. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in March that the government had already revoked 300 or more visas for students and other visitors, in part due to pro-Palestinian activism, and that the administration was doing it “every day.”
The visa terminations led to a bevy of lawsuits against the administration. Dozens of judges have since ruled against the government, as least temporarily.
Still, some foreign students have already left the U.S., The New York Times reported. That includes Momodou Taal, a British Gambian student at Cornell University whose visa was terminated in late March over his pro-Palestinian activism. Taal said in a statement at the time that he had “lost faith that a favourable ruling from the courts would guarantee my personal safety and ability to express my beliefs.”
