U.S. Restores Legal Status for Many International Students, but Warns of Removals to Come

Immigration officials signaled that the Trump administration would continue to pursue efforts to terminate the legal status of the students, despite a wave of legal challenges.

The Trump administration on Friday abruptly moved to restore thousands of international students’ ability to study in the United States legally, but immigration officials insisted they could still try to terminate that legal status despite a wave of legal challenges.

The decision, revealed during a court hearing in Washington, was a dramatic shift by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even as the administration characterized it as only a temporary reprieve.

The back and forth only contributed to the anxiety and confusion facing international students as the administration has moved to cancel more than 1,500 student visas in recent weeks.

On Friday morning, Joseph F. Carilli, a Justice Department lawyer, told a federal judge in Washington that immigration officials had begun work on a new system for reviewing and terminating the records of international students and academics studying in the United States. Until the process was complete, he said, student records that had been purged from a federal database in recent weeks would be restored, along with their legal status.

A senior Department of Homeland Security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the students whose legal status was restored on Friday could still very well have it terminated in the future, along with their visas.

The changes on Friday came amid a wave of individual lawsuits filed by students who have said they were notified that their legal right to study in the United States was rescinded, often with minimal explanation. In some cases, students had minor traffic violations or other infractions. But in other cases, there appeared to be no obvious cause for the revocations.

Upon learning that their records had been deleted from the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or SEVIS, scores of students have sued to preserve their status, producing a flurry of emergency orders by judges blocking the changes by ICE.

“We have not reversed course on a single visa revocation,” said Tricia McLaughlin, a Homeland Security Department spokeswoman. “What we did is restore SEVIS access for people who had not had their visa revoked.”

It was not clear how many student visa holders have left the country to date after their records were deleted; facing the prospect of arrest, at least a handful have left before risking deportation. But the Trump administration had stoked panic among students who found themselves under threat of detention and deportation. A handful of students, including a graduate student at Cornell, have voluntarily left the country after abandoning their legal fight.

“It is good to see ICE recognize the illegality of its actions canceling SEVIS registrations for these students,” said Charles Kuck, an immigration lawyer who led a separate lawsuit over the revocations. “Sad that it took losing 50 times. What we don’t yet know is what ICE will do to repair the damage it has done, especially for those students who lost jobs and offers and had visas revoked.”

Judges reviewing the lawsuits so far have shown significant doubt that the abrupt changes to scores of students’ legal status are lawful, especially given the haphazard and often seemingly arbitrary way the administration has proceeded.

In March, the Trump administration moved to cancel visas and begin deportation proceedings against a number of students who had participated in demonstrations against Israel during the wave of campus protests last year over the war in Gaza. Federal judges had halted some of those revocations and slammed the brakes on efforts to remove those students from the country.

But in recent weeks, many students received word that their records had been deleted from the SEVIS database. That caused a wave of panic across the country among students and academics whose prospects of finishing a degree or completing graduate research were upended without warning.

By Friday evening, the government had already started moving to dismiss lawsuits over the SEVIS deletions, arguing that the administration’s policy change had made them unnecessary, since deleted records would be restored.

Other lawsuits, including a potential class action involving a number of states in New England, have moved forward, seeking to stop the administration from more broadly from carrying out further mass cancellations.

Another case out of Massachusetts, focused on instances where students were targeted over their speech in support of Palestine, a group has sued to prevent the administration from seeking to remove international students on First Amendment grounds.

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