In reversal, Trump admin reinstates revoked US visas for foreign students
The Trump administration has reversed course on terminating the visa registrations of international students studying in the United States, according to Politico .
The Department of Justice on Friday announced the reversal of the terminations in federal court.
It came after weeks of scrutiny from courts and several restraining orders that were issued by judges who interpreted the mass termination of students from a federal database that universities and the federal government use to track international students in the country as illegal, Politico reported.
The terminations from the federal database, the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System database (SEVIS), resulted in more than 100 lawsuits, according to Politico. Judges in more than 50 of the cases ordered the Trump administration to temporarily undo the actions, according to Politico.
There have also been lawsuits from students over the termination of their immigration statuses.
Five international students filed a federal class action lawsuit last week in New Hampshire federal court that aims to represent more than 100 students in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island and Puerto Rico who had their F-1 student immigration status revoked by the Republican administration.
The students are Linkhith Babu Gorrela, Thanuj Kumar Gummadavelli and Manikanta Pasula. All are from India and are students at Rivier University in New Hampshire, along with Hangrui Zhang and Haoyang An, both of China, who attend Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts.
The lawsuit asks the court to reinstate their F-1 student status, which would allow them to continue their studies, according to a press release issued last Friday from the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire.
According to the lawsuit , the visa terminations disrupted the students' education in the middle of a semester as they worked to achieve degrees and followed all the rules required of them, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing them.
Gorrela's graduation date for his master's program, for example, is May 20.
With terminated F-1 statuses, the students are also now at risk of detention and deportation, the ACLU argued.
The terminations conducted by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security have been occurring since at least March 1, according to the ACLU.
"We continue to be alarmed by the Trump administration's sudden termination of student statuses at universities across the country without any notice or stated explanation," Gilles Bissonnette, legal director of the ACLU of New Hampshire, said.
"International students are a vital community in our state's universities, and no administration should be allowed to circumvent the law to unilaterally strip students of status, disrupt their studies, and put them at risk of deportation," Bissonnette said
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