The Trump administration restores the legal status of international students who have been terminated their files in recent weeks, a lawyer of the government announced on Friday at a hearing.
Elizabeth D. Kurlan, lawyer of the Ministry of Justice, said at the hearing in the North District of California in Oakland that recordings for international students will be reactivated for the moment, because immigration and customs application will develop a new policy that “will provide a framework for the end of state records”.
This decision comes for weeks after the Trump administration began to revoke the visas of a few thousand international students in addition to their files and their legal statutes, which apparently aim at those who participated in political activism or have had previous accusations, such as Dui.
“Ice still maintains the authority to terminate a SEVIS file for other reasons,” said Kurlan during the hearing, referring to the student program and exchange of visitors “, as if a student does not maintain his non-immigrant status after the file is reactivated, or engages in another illegal activity which would make it the referral of the United States under immigration and unlimited law.
Kurlan also said that in the future, Ice will not end the statutes only on the basis of the National Crime Information Center results, a computerized index which includes information on the criminal history, which have led to some of the recent registered layoffs of SEVIS.
Many international students with completed statutes began to discover that their files were suddenly restored on Thursday afternoon, I immigration lawyers and universities in the United States in NBC News told NBC News. The reintegration took place with little or no explanation, said lawyers.
“It is as if someone had launched a lighting switch,” said Jath Shao, an immigration lawyer based in Cleveland who has a customer who experienced the sudden reversal.
The changes hit many students, but not all. At the University of California in Berkeley, a dozen of 23 international students who have terminated their files ago SEVIS were reintegrated, said the spokesman for the University Janet Gilmore.
Some students from the Rochester Institute of Technology also experienced a reinstatement, said the school’s public information director Carl Langsenkamp. Charles Kuck, a lawyer based in Atlanta, said that he had a dozen customers who reported a similar reversal.
David Wilson, who represents about twenty students in Minnesota, said that around half of his clients had restored their statutes. However, he added that there was still a lot of uncertainty, especially because many of their student visas remain revoked.
“This means that they are in a way trapped in the country. It will therefore be the next phase of the clarity of what the government really does,” said Wilson.
In addition, the dismissal of the status will always appear on the students’ files, potentially putting any future application for green cards or any other relief, said immigration lawyers.
“The time they have made their SEVIS status dismissed could still have harmful effects for these students,” said Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigran Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School. “It is therefore not enough that the federal government simply restores the service files. The government should somehow make students whole. ”
Shao, the lawyer, said that development is small but positive for international students. However, he said that more must be done to guarantee their security in the United States
“Currently, it is obvious that the Trump administration has spent the four years of Biden to plot its revenge on the immigration system,” said Shao. “But once some courageous students and lawyers went to the courts – the administration defenders could not or did not want to explain the justification.”
