The federal government is reversing the termination of legal status for international students after many filed court challenges around the U.S., a government lawyer said Friday.
In Massachusetts, where at least 115 students have had their visas revoked, university officials and students’ attorneys said they are already seeing their student visa system registrations being restored.
Judges around the country had already issued temporary orders restoring the students’ records in a federal database of international students maintained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. The records had been suddenly terminated in recent weeks, often without the students or their schools being notified.
A lawyer for the government read a statement in federal court in Oakland that said ICE was manually restoring the student status for people whose records were terminated in recent weeks. A similar statement was read by a government attorney in a separate case in Washington on Friday, said lawyer Brian Green, who represents the plaintiff in that case. Green provided The Associated Press with a copy of the statement that the government lawyer emailed to him.
It says: “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 re-activated 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.”
Green said that the government lawyer said it would apply to all students in the same situation, not just those who had filed lawsuits.
SEVIS is the Student and Exchange Visitor Information Systems database that tracks international students’ compliance with their visa status. NCIC is the National Crime Information Center, which is maintained by the FBI. Many of the students whose records were terminated were told that their status was terminated as a result of a criminal records check or that their visa had been revoked.
International students and their schools were caught off guard by the terminations of the students’ records. Many of the terminations were discovered when school officials were doing routine checks of the international student database or when they checked specifically after hearing about other terminations.
At the University of Massachusetts, more than 25 students across five campuses had their SEVIS registrations terminated.
“I can confirm some students from UMass campuses are seeing their student registrations in SEVIS returned to normal status, which were previously revoked,” said spokesperson Colleen Quinn. “The university does not have an exact number of students reinstated; this is an evolving situation.”
At Harvard University, officials are aware of 12 international students and recent graduates who have had their F-1 visa status terminated. Six of those Harvard students and recent graduates have since had their visa status reverted to “active status,” according to the university’s media office.
The university checks SEVIS records daily, and notifies students of any revocations and reinstatements and refers them to legal assistance.
There are many lawsuits related to the topic and students having their immigration statuses revoked. One is a federal class action lawsuit filed in New Hampshire federal court last week by five international students, representing students in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Puerto Rico who had their F-1 visas revoked by the administration. Two of those students, Hangrui Zhang and Haoyang An, both from China, attend Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. The suit seeks to have their visas reinstated .
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