Trump administration reverses course on international students' revocation

After spending the past several weeks abruptly revoking the ability of more than 1,500 international students to study in the U.S., often without explanation, the Trump administration reversed course Friday and said it would reinstate the affected scholars, allowing them to continue their coursework.

Students across Western Pennsylvania are affected by the change, including Carnegie Mellon University computer engineering major Jayson Ma, who learned late Thursday that his student status had been restored.

The sudden about-face was announced Friday in cases playing out in at least two different federal courtrooms in San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

At the hearing in Washington, according to immigration attorney Brian Green, Justice Department attorney Joseph F. Carrillo Jr. told a judge that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is working to develop a new policy for terminations under the Student and Exchange Visitor Information Center, and in the meantime, those students who had already received notice will be reactivated.

For weeks, panic and uncertainty have spread among international students at campuses across the country — including the University of Pittsburgh, Gannon University, La Roche University and CMU.

In many cases, affected students had brushes with the law for relatively minor infractions.

While it is unclear if the government’s move marks only a temporary reprieve for the students, Green said he was elated by Friday’s developments.

“It’s been a two-week sprint,” Green said. “It hasn’t really sunk in yet.”

Even Thursday afternoon, Justice Department attorneys told a federal judge in one of Green’s cases that they would not settle.

By Friday morning, however, things had changed.

A government statement provided to Green said ICE is creating a “framework” for terminating the status of international students in the federal database that monitors and tracks them.

Until that work is complete, according to the statement, the students will be allowed to resume their studies — and won’t have their status terminated strictly because of run-ins with law enforcement that caused them to be targeted in the first place.

The statement said ICE can still terminate student status for other reasons, such as engaging in the kinds of unlawful activity that would be grounds for deportation.

Nearly 100 lawsuits

After hundreds of international students began receiving notice early this month that their status had been terminated by the federal government, immigration attorneys across the country mobilized and filed at least 96 lawsuits in U.S. District Courts, including about a half dozen in Western Pennsylvania.

Complaints were filed by students at CMU, Gannon and La Roche alleging that the federal government had no legal basis to remove the students. Most sought a temporary restraining order.

Under the law, according to the complaints, the only ways a student can fail to maintain status is by not maintaining a full course of study, taking an unauthorized job, providing false information to Homeland Security or being convicted of a crime of violence with a potential sentence of more than one year in prison.

The students targeted for the SEVIS terminations, attorneys said, all appeared to have at least minimal interaction with law enforcement, including arrests for disorderly conduct, driving under the influence and other minor infractions.

None of them, the attorneys argued, was worthy of student status termination.

Making noise

Ma, who is from China, received notice on April 7 that his status as an international student had been terminated. Although he had a lawsuit ready to go, according to his attorney, Joseph Murphy, they never had to file it.

Instead, after a media blitz that included a press conference with Ma and local reporters, an official with CMU emailed Ma at 10:24 p.m. on Thursday telling him his status had been reinstated, Murphy told TribLive.

He thinks the vast amounts of attention on the international students’ cases helped.

“It is a coordinated campaign of litigation by immigration attorneys,” Murphy said. “Obviously, we made a lot of noise. People saw the story in the news.”

Ma, 24, came to the United States for high school in 2016 and was accepted at CMU four years later to study electrical computer engineering.

He was charged with driving under the influence in 2023 but completed Allegheny County’s Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition program successfully, resulting in expungement of the charges.

He has only one full semester left in his studies and was distraught at the prospect of not finishing his degree.

The notice Ma received on Thursday read: “Your SEVIS record has been returned to active status. Hopefully it will stay that way… We will continue to check daily.”

‘No legal basis’

Immigration attorney Chris Casazza said that he is cautiously optimistic on Friday’s turn of events.

“I think ICE is retreating, but I think they’re going to regroup and may come back in another more detrimental way,” he said. “They’re certainly not waving a white flag, I don’t think.”

Witold “Vic” Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, called Friday’s move not a victory, but “a reprieve.”

“The Trump administration’s needless, heedless and cruel revocation of SEVIS registrations terrorized over a thousand students nationwide for absolutely no good reason,” Walczak said. “Dozens of federal judges, of all political persuasions, blocked the revocations, demonstrating how insanely illegal they were.

“No one, not even the president, should be able to toy with peoples’ lives in this way. “

Casazza, who represents two students from Gannon whose status was terminated, said federal district courts across the country had consistently been ruling in favor of the students who were seeking restraining orders against the federal government to protect their student status.

“I think they lost 95% of these cases,” Casazza said. “I don’t think they saw an avenue they could win any of these cases at any level.”

The law on this issue, Casazza said, is cut-and-dried.

“You even had conservative judges across the country saying there’s no legal basis there,” he said.

Damage done

Green said that immigration attorneys will continue trying to figure out how international students with law enforcement interactions were targeted.

He wonders if artificial intelligence was used to scrape the FBI fingerprint database and then compare it to the SEVIS database.

“Judges have been asking those questions, too,” Green said.

It is likely that most of the pending lawsuits will be withdrawn, although some people could continue to pursue potential attorneys fees or damages.

Although the students’ SEVIS status will be reinstated, the students whose visas were revoked will not have those restored, Green said.

What that means, Casazza said, is that they will not be able to travel internationally or go in and out of the United States unless they reapply for a new visa.

“There’s certainly some damage that’s been done,” he said.

In the meantime, Green is encouraging his clients to print out the DOJ statement and carry it with them in their wallets.

Casazza said he will tell the students he’s representing to return to their studies and live a normal life but be extra cautious over the next few months.

“This is where the judges and the bar stood up for what’s right,” said Green, who previously lived and worked in Pittsburgh and attended Washington & Jefferson College. “The system worked the right way. This is a good ending for a very bizarre story.”