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The Trump administration has reversed course on terminating the visa registrations of hundreds of foreign students, bowing to rising criticism and legal judgments from its pressure campaign against the universities.
In a court filing on Friday, the Department of Justice said it would reinstate the records required to be eligible for a student visa until it had issued a new policy on how to legally rescind students’ rights to study in the US.
The abrupt reversal followed criticism from US universities, which rely on foreign students paying hefty tuition fees. Students had also launched lawsuits against the Trump administration over the visa cancellations.
The shift is another sign of turbulence in Donald Trump’s aggressive anti-immigration campaign, which has seen federal courts rule against some of the administration’s most controversial deportations.
Friday’s decision leaves uncertainty over the future of about 1,500 students who had lost their visa status. It remains unclear whether students who have left the US will be able to reapply for visas and receive them in consulates abroad, said Fanta Aw, chief executive of Nafsa, a group of universities involved in international education.
The justice department on Friday said it would reinstate records purged from the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (Sevis), many of which were terminated with no explanation. Some of the visa terminations were a result of minor misdemeanours such as traffic offences.
“We have not reversed course on a single visa revocation. What we did is restore Sevis access for people who had not had their visa revoked,” said Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin.
The action does not affect the separate wave of detentions and deportations that targeted foreign students accused of threatening national security because of their association with pro-Palestinian protests.
Aw cautioned that the Trump administration’s decision to stop removing records from Sevis does not signal an end to the clampdown on foreign students, but could instead lead to new and tougher regulations.
“This is just a chapter with more to come,” Aw said. “Conceivably the administration will come back with new regulations that would allow any violations to be grounds enough for revocation.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Additional reporting by Steff Chávez in Washington
