The Trump administration is restoring the legal status of international students who had their records terminated in recent weeks, a government attorney said Friday at a hearing.
Elizabeth D. Kurlan, an attorney for the Justice Department, said during the hearing in the Northern District of California in Oakland that records for international students will be reactivated for the time being, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement crafts a new policy that will “provide a framework for status record termination.”
The move comes weeks after the Trump administration began revoking the visas of some thousands of international students in addition to their records and legal statuses, seemingly taking aim at those who’ve participated in political activism or have had previous charges, like DUIs.
“ICE still maintains the authority to terminate a SEVIS record for other reasons,” Kurlan said at the hearing, referring to the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, “such as if a student fails to maintain his or her nonimmigrant status after the record is reactivated, or engages in other unlawful activity that would render him or her removable from the United States under the Immigration and Nationality Act.”
Kurlan also said that going forward, ICE will not be terminating statuses solely based on findings in the National Crime Information Center, a computerized index that includes criminal history information, that resulted in some of the recent SEVIS record terminations.
Many international students with terminated statuses began to discover that their records were abruptly restored Thursday afternoon, immigration attorneys and universities across the U.S. told NBC News. The reinstatements occurred with little-to-no explanation, the attorneys said.
“It’s like somebody flipped a light switch on,” Jath Shao, a Cleveland-based immigration attorney who has a client that experienced the sudden reversal.
The changes have hit many, but not all, students. At the University of California, Berkeley, a dozen of the 23 international students who had their records terminated in the SEVIS weeks ago were reinstated, university spokesperson Janet Gilmore said.
A few students at the Rochester Institute of Technology also experienced reinstatement, the school’s public information director, Carl Langsenkamp, said. Charles Kuck, an Atlanta-based attorney, said he has about a dozen clients who reported a similar reversal.
David Wilson, who represents around 20 students in Minnesota, said about half of his clients have had their statuses restored. He added, however, that there’s still a great deal of uncertainty, particularly because many of their student visas still remain revoked.
“That means they’re kind of trapped in the country. So that’ll be the next phase of seeking clarity as to what the government’s actually doing,” Wilson said.
Additionally, the status termination will still appear on students’ records, potentially jeopardizing any future applications for green cards or other relief, the immigration attorneys said.
“The time that they had their SEVIS status terminated could still have harmful effects for those students,” said Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School. “So it’s not enough for the federal government to simply restore service records. The government would need to somehow make the students whole.”
Shao, the attorney, said that the development is a small but positive one for international students. However, he said more needs to be done to guarantee their safety in the U.S.
“By now it’s obvious that the Trump administration spent the four years of Biden plotting their revenge on the immigration system,” Shao said. “But once some brave students and lawyers went to the courts — the administration’s defenders were unable or unwilling to explain the rationale.”