After suddenly terminating the legal status of at least dozens of international students who attend universities in the Bay Area, President Donald Trump’s administration reversed course late last week and restored status for many affected students — but not all.
Federal officials said Friday they have reinstated students’ legal status while they take time to craft an overarching policy on the terminations, which have confused and terrified foreign students. Nationally, the administration had abruptly revoked the legal status of more than 1,200 students in a murky process.
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Andrew Newcomb, an immigration attorney in San Jose, said the federal government’s reversal was a “face-saving measure” by the Republican administration after officials disregarded the due process of students.
“It wasn’t that they had a change of heart or wanted to be kinder to the students, or anything like that,” Newcomb said.
Trump officials’ stated reason for the crackdown was to remove international students who they considered antisemitic for protesting against the Israeli war in Gaza.
“If you come to this country as a student we expect you to go to class and study and get a degree,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose department oversees visas, said on April 10. “If you come here to like vandalize a library, take over a campus and do all kinds of crazy things, you know, we’re going to get rid of these people, and we’re going to continue to do it.”
“So when we identify lunatics like these we take away their student visa,” Rubio added. “No one’s entitled to a student visa.”
A U.S. Department of Homeland Security official told The Associated Press on Friday that the agency was reinstating students’ records in the Student and Exchange Information System database, or SEVIS, which the federal government uses to track if international students are complying with visa requirements, such as staying unemployed while studying and avoiding criminal activity.
But immigration attorneys in the Bay Area said students with no history of activism had been targeted. These students were given little or vague notice when their status was erased. Some had broken the law in a minor way, attorneys said.
Among the lawsuits by students, several of whom are identified only by initials, one had been convicted of a misdemeanor for driving while intoxicated in 2018 and another for misdemeanor disturbing the peace. Others had been arrested for unspecified charges that later were dropped, or cited no known legal troubles.
At UC Berkeley, a spokesperson said Monday that federal immigration officials restored the legal status of all 23 students who were thrown into legal limbo earlier this month when the Trump administration began mysteriously eliminating their immigration status in a federal database, as part of a nationwide crackdown on supposed antisemitism on college campuses. All four affected students at Cal State East Bay also had their status reinstated, a spokesperson said, which means they can continue to live and study in the U.S. for now.
At Stanford University, seven students with canceled visas now have legal status again. So do eight students at San Jose State University, spokesperson Michelle Smith McDonald said in an email. However, that still leaves five foreign students on that campus whose future in the U.S. is in jeopardy.
These foreign students may have a grace period, depending on their visa type. But nationally, the federal government told many affected students to leave the U.S. immediately or risk being arrested and detained in an immigration detention center, according to attorneys. On campuses, some professors allowed impacted students to attend classes remotely to avoid encountering federal immigration agents.
Newcomb said the timing of the federal government’s reversal was not coincidental: On Friday, top Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials were set to testify in district court in Oakland about their protocols for revoking student legal status, he said.
San Francisco-based attorneys had sued the federal government over the terminations in the U.S. District Court’s Northern District of California. Senior District Judge Jeffrey S. White has temporarily ordered ICE to stop pursuing legal action against foreign students until at least mid-May.
The attorneys, with the Van Der Hout law firm, wrote in a statement Monday that the federal government’s reversal is cold comfort.
“ICE has provided no assurance that the agency will not arbitrarily terminate students’ SEVIS statuses again in the future,” the firm wrote. “Furthermore, it remains unclear whether the unlawful terminations will have any effect on the ability of students to secure immigration benefits in the future.”
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