US government expands grounds for canceling international students’ legal status

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal government is expanding the reasons international students can be stripped of their legal status in the U.S., where thousands have come under scrutiny in a Trump administration crackdown that has left many afraid of being deported.

Attorneys for international students say the new reasons allow for quicker deportations and serve to justify many of the actions the government took this spring to cancel foreign students’ permission to study in the U.S.

After abruptly losing their legal status in recent weeks with little explanation, students around the country filed challenges in federal courts. In many cases, judges made preliminary rulings that the government acted without due process.

Then the government said it would issue new guidelines for canceling a student’s legal status. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement document shared Monday in a court filing said valid reasons now include the revocation of the visas students used to enter the U.S.

In the past, if a student’s visa was revoked, they generally could stay in the U.S. to finish school. They simply would not be able to reenter if they left the country.

“This just gave them carte blanche to have the State Department revoke a visa and then deport those students, even if they’ve done nothing wrong,” said Brad Banias, an immigration attorney representing a student who lost his status in the crackdown. The student was once charged with a traffic offense, which appeared in a law enforcement database searched by immigration authorities.

Banias said the new guidelines vastly expand the authority of ICE beyond its previous policy, which did not count visa revocation as grounds to take away a student’s permission to be in the country.

Students learn their records were removed

In the past month, foreign students around the U.S. have been rattled to learn their records were removed from a student database maintained by ICE. Some went into hiding for fear of deportation or abandoned their studies to return home.

As the court challenges mounted, federal officials said Friday that the government would restore international students’ legal status while it developed a framework to guide future action. The new policy emerged in court a few days later.

The new guidance allows for revoking students’ status if their names appear in a criminal or fingerprint database in a way that was not permitted in the past, said Charles Kuck, an Atlanta-based immigration attorney who has filed a lawsuit on behalf of 133 people in the U.S. on student visas who lost their legal status.

“Basically, they’re trying to cover what they already did bad by making the bad thing that they did now legal for them to do,” Kuck said.

Many of the students who had visas revoked or lost their legal status said they had only minor infractions on their records, including traffic violations. Some did not know why they were targeted at all.

Lawyers for the government provided some explanation at a hearing Tuesday in the case of Banias’ client Akshar Patel, an international student studying information systems in Texas. Patel’s status was revoked and then reinstated this month, and he asked the court to keep him from being deported.

In court filings and at the hearing, Department of Homeland Security officials said they ran the names of student visa holders through the National Crime Information Center, an FBI-run database that contains reams of information related to crimes. It includes the names of suspects, missing persons and people who have been arrested, even if they have never been charged with a crime or had charges dropped.

In total, about 6,400 students were identified in the database search, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes said Tuesday at the hearing. One of the students was Patel, who was pulled over and charged with reckless driving in 2018. The charge was ultimately dropped — information that is also in the database.

Patel appears in a spreadsheet with 734 students. That spreadsheet was forwarded to a Homeland Security official, who, within 24 hours of receiving it, replied: “Please terminate all in SEVIS,” referring to a different database listing foreigners who have legal status as students in the U.S.

Judge suggests government did not review individual records

Reyes said the short time frame suggested no one had reviewed the records individually to find out why the students’ names were in the database.

“All of this could have been avoided if someone had taken a beat,” said Reyes, who was appointed by President Joe Biden. She said the government had demonstrated “an utter lack of concern for individuals who have come into this country.”

While the Department of Homeland Security was revoking students’ legal status, the State Department was canceling the visas some students used to enter the country.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he canceled some visas because of student involvement in pro-Palestinian protests, which he says hurt U.S. foreign policy interests. But he acknowledged in March that some of the cancellations were “unrelated to any protests” and were “just having to do with potential criminal activity.”

“My standard: If we knew this information about them before we gave them a visa, would we have allowed them in?” Rubio told reporters in March. “If the answer is no, then we revoke the visa.”

Even though students used to remain in the U.S. after their visas were revoked, Rubio espoused a different standard in March: “Your visa is expired, your visa is revoked, you have to leave,” he said. “There is no right to a student visa.”

Crackdown sowed chaos and confusion on campus

At the start of the crackdown, when colleges discovered the students no longer had legal status, it prompted chaos and confusion. In the past, college officials say, legal statuses typically were updated after colleges told the government the students were no longer studying at the school.

In some cases this spring, colleges told students to stop working or taking classes immediately and warned them they could be deported.

Government attorneys said the change in the foreign students database did not mean the students actually lost legal status, even though some of the students were labeled “failure to maintain status.” Instead, lawyers said, it was intended to be an “investigative red flag.”

Patel “is lawfully present in the U.S.,” Andre Watson of the Department of Homeland Security said. “He is not subject to immediate detention or removal.”

Reyes declined to issue a preliminary injunction and urged lawyers from both sides to come to a settlement to ensure Patel could stay in the U.S.

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Associated Press Writer Kate Brumback in Atlanta contributed to this report.

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