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.
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.
In Colorado, at least 38 international students have seen their visas revoked by the Trump administration in recent weeks.
Zachary R. New, an Aurora-based immigration attorney who has filed nine lawsuits on behalf of Colorado students, said Friday that he already has seen records restored for some of the international students he is representing.
“We are very happy to see that ICE has changed its tune on this issue, but it has been so incredibly disruptive and harmful to thousands of students, and we still need answers both for the students in these lawsuits and for students who were not able to join a lawsuit,” he wrote in an email to The Denver Post.
A lawyer for the government read a statement in federal court in Oakland on Friday 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.
As of April 17, University of Colorado officials said they were aware of 22 student-visa revocations across their campuses in Boulder, Denver, Aurora and Colorado Springs. Colorado State University officials said 16 of their students have had visas revoked.
The first three lawsuits filed by New on behalf of Colorado students earlier this month said each of the students had been notified that their SEVIS records were being terminated. They were identified in the lawsuits only as “Student Doe” due to fear of retaliation.
Each is from an unspecified Asian country, according to the complaints. Their schools aren’t identified, but the lawsuits say the students are from Denver, Fort Collins and Colorado Springs.
New on Friday said ICE’s decision “does take some of the ’emergency’ out of these cases,” but that many questions remain, including what impact the temporary SEVIS disruption will have on the students’ abilities to stay in the U.S. in the future.
“A big lingering question is just ‘why?’ ” New wrote. “Did ICE terminate all of these records for no reason at all, or were there alternative plans (detention, deportation, etc.) that either were not able to take effect because of the hundreds of lawsuits filed across the country?”
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