U.S. colleges and universities told foreign students to leave the country when they did not have to do so, as institutions of higher learning scrambled to comply with Trump administration directives, according to a report that came ahead multiple recent court decisions against the government.
Amid defunding threats from President Donald Trump and pressure from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials, universities have told "many hundreds" of international students that they have lost their immigration status and must immediately self-deport.
These notifications were based on the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) termination of students' records on the Student Exchange and Visitor Information System (SEVIS), a database used by schools and authorities to access visa information, The Intercept's Natasha Lennard reported last week.
This, despite DHS admitting last week in a
court filing that the agency has no authority to terminate students' immigration status via the system.
So far, the State Department has revoked the visas of more than 1,500 students,
almost all of them nonwhite, and "particularly those who have expressed support for Palestinian freedom," as Lennard noted.
However, there is an important distinction between revoking a student visa and the rescission of legal nonimmigrant status.
According to Lennard:
The revocation of a student visa is not, in and of itself, necessarily grounds for a student to be deported. Yet schools have been reacting to SEVIS terminations, not visa revocations, when they have disenrolled students or advised students to immediately leave the country.
"Now ICE has submitted sworn declarations that SEVIS record termination has no legal effect on the student whatsoever," Nathan Yaffe, a lawyer representing foreign students facing deportation in separate cases, told Lennard.
"Any school that continues to disenroll (and refuses to reenroll) students is voluntarily punishing students to align itself with the Trump administration's agenda," Yaffe added. "Disenrolling students was already a blatant capitulation, and now it is a wholly inexcusable one."
The DHS admission came in response to a lawsuit filed by four University of Michigan and Wayne State University students who sued the Trump administration over the termination of their
F-1 status, which allowed them to study in the United States. The suit is one of 16 filed by at least 50 international students facing deportation, according to Inside Higher Ed.
The Trump administration points to the fact that the students' visas were revoked by the State Department and not DHS in claiming that they're suing the wrong federal agency. However, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952—which empowers the secretary of state to expel noncitizens whose presence in the United States is deemed detrimental to U.S. foreign policy interests—explicitly prohibits judicial review of visa revocations.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has invoked the act to target pro-Palestine international students who the government admits committed no crimes. These include
Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Yunseo Chung—all permanent U.S. residents—as well as Rümeysa Öztürk, Ranjani Srinivasan, and others. Far-right, pro-Israel groups like Betar and Canary Mission have compiled lists containing the names of these and other pro-Palestine students that are shared with the Trump administration for possible deportation.
Foreign nationals—and some U.S. citizens wrongfully swept up in the Trump administration's deportation blitz—are held in facilities including private, for-profit detention centers amid
widespread reports of poor conditions and alleged abuses including denial of medical care, insufficient access to feminine hygiene products, and rotten food at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center.
The Trump administration's dubious legal arguments have not fared well in court. Several federal courts have temporarily blocked the administration from proceeding with deportations based on SEVIS terminations.
"How is this occurring? There has to be some regulations for when it's appropriate and not appropriate."
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Victoria M. Calvert, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, issued a temporary restraining order against the Trump administration and directed ICE to restore the legal status of 133 students whose visas were revoked due to SEVIS terminations, many of them following minor infractions like traffic violations.
Akiva Freidlin, a ACLU of Georgia senior staff attorney who filed the lawsuit, said that "the Constitution protects everyone on American soil, so the Trump administration cannot ignore due process to unjustifiably threaten students with the loss of immigration status, and arrest and deportation."
"We believe this ruling shows the students are likely to prevail on their claims and we are pleased the court ordered the government to halt its unlawful actions while the lawsuit continues," Freidlin added.
On Monday, U.S. District Judge Michael McShane, who was nominated by former President Barack Obama, temporarily blocked the deportation of two Oregon students and ordered the Trump administration to restore their status.
"How is this occurring?" McShane asked incredulously. "There has to be some regulations for when it's appropriate and not appropriate. What regulation is ICE following here?"
Last week, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, another Biden nominee, excoriated Trump officials in an extraordinary rebuke.
"I've got two experienced immigration lawyers on behalf of a client who is months away from graduation, who has done nothing wrong, who has been terminated from a system that you all keep telling me has no effect on his immigration status, although that clearly is B.S.," Reyes said.
"And now, his two very experienced lawyers can't even tell him whether or not he's here legally, because the court can't tell him whether or not he's here legally, because the government's counsel can't tell him if he's here legally," she added. "Do you realize that this is Kafkaesque?"
Last week, the ACLU and affiliates filed a federal class action lawsuit against the Trump administration in New Hampshire for targeting foreign students whose F-1 status was cancelled.
"Defendants' unilateral and unlawful terminations have severely disrupted the educational opportunities of students who are in the middle of their studies (and in the middle of a semester) and who are simply trying to obtain, often at considerable expense, an education in the United States while following all the rules required of them," the suit states.
