According to reports by The New York Times, Reuters, and others, the Trump administration announced in a federal court hearing today (April 25) that it is walking back its cancellation of more than 1,500 F-1 visas held by international students in the United States. Joseph F. Carilli, a Justice Department lawyer, said that immigration officials are developing a new policy framework for reviewing and terminating visas for international students and that agencies would not make any further changes or revocations until the process was complete.
The announcement follows a wave of lawsuits filed by international students who were notified unexpectedly that their legal right to study in the states was being rescinded. Many of these revocations were based on minor traffic violations or similar infractions, while others offered no explanation and no obvious cause for cancellation of their F-1 status. Brown Immigration Law has been directly involved in pursuing relief for individuals impacted by these sweeping actions, including one such student who unfairly and arbitrarily had her F-1 visa revoked and SEVIS record terminated weeks before graduating with her PhD in Chemical and Biological Engineering. These efforts were led by Managing Attorney Allison Heimes and Partner Ryan Kelly working alongside South Dakota Civil Rights Attorney James Leach, who were successfully granted a TRO requiring the government to reinstate her SEVIS record, thus protecting her lawful stay in the United States.
We were pleased to see these efforts prevail alongside hundreds of other court orders temporarily barring the administration from inappropriate F-1 cancellations over the past several months and are hopeful based on the announcement today that students will no longer have to go to such lengths to protect visa statuses that have been properly granted and lawfully maintained according to the terms of that status.
While we welcome the news of the Trump administration restoring hundreds of students’ F-1 status while a new policy framework for SEVIS record terminations is created, it does suggest that this relief may be temporary. It is unclear at this point what the new framework will entail or when it might be implemented. As always, we will keep a close eye on the situation and provide updates as soon as we know more.
