Some international students in Chicago have had their student visas reinstated after court challenges around the U.S. led the federal government to reverse the termination of legal status for international students, lawyers said Friday.
Judges around the country had already issued temporary orders restoring the students’ records in a federal database of international students maintained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. The records had been suddenly terminated in recent weeks, often without the students or their schools being notified.
Chicago-based immigration attorney Waleed Nasir represents eight students who sued in Chicago federal court after their records were removed from the Student Exchange and Visitor Information System. Those students had their student visas reinstated after a federal judge ordered the government to do so earlier this week.
Nasir said he started hearing from clients and other immigration attorneys Thursday evening about visas being restored for other students.
“There’s been a change of policy overnight … things have entered a new stage,” Nasir said. “So, I wouldn’t say that the war is over but maybe this battle is.”
Still, Nasir said it was hard to quantify the damage that had already been done by the decision to abruptly revoke student visas in the first place. He spoke of students who had turned down job offers or decided to leave the country rather than risk arrest by immigration agents.
WBEZ last week reported on a University of Illinois at Chicago student from India who had decided to self-deport on the advice of attorneys.
Sarah Spreitzer, vice president of the American Council on Education, said she started hearing from campuses Thursday about students being added back to the Student Exchange and Visitor Information System, or SEVIS. She said the students were being reinstated just as quietly and abruptly as they had been removed.
“I think late on Thursday, early today, [universities] started noticing that some of the SEVIS records were being restored, but this wasn’t because DHS informed them that they were going to be taking this action,” Spreitzer said. “I think some students have been contacted directly about having their student visas restored. So we haven’t heard anything officially from DHS or from [the state department].”
A lawyer for the government read a statement in federal court in Oakland that said ICE was manually restoring the student status for people whose records were terminated in recent weeks. A similar statement was read by a government attorney in a separate case in Washington on Friday, said lawyer Brian Green, who represents the plaintiff in that case. Green provided The Associated Press with a copy of the statement that the government lawyer emailed to him.
It says: “ICE is developing a policy that will provide a framework for SEVIS record terminations. Until such a policy is issued, the SEVIS records for plaintiff(s) in this case (and other similarly situated plaintiffs) will remain Active or shall be re-activated if not currently active and ICE will not modify the record solely based on the NCIC finding that resulted in the recent SEVIS record termination.”
Green said that the government lawyer said it would apply to all students in the same situation, not just those who had filed lawsuits.
“The University is encouraged by this development and its impact on our current and former international students,” said Northwestern University spokesperson Jon Yates. Visas for several current and former Northwestern students had been terminated this month.
Several international students and scholars at University of Illinois Chicago also have recently had their visas reinstated, univesity spokesperson Brian Flood said.
“The university continues to assist each member of our international community whose status has not been restored with support, guidance, and resources to help them navigate recent federal immigration actions,” Flood said.
Spreitzer, with the American Council on Education, said the reversal still left questions about students who had self-deported or who had already started withdrawing from classes. She said this month has seen “a lot of chaos, a lot of confusion, a lot of concern, a lot of our institutions trying to figure out how best to support our international students.”
She said universities were still seeking basic information from the federal government about why it was revoking student visas, whose visas would be terminated, and now whose visas were being restored.
“We’re going to be monitoring the situation very closely. And our institutions stand ready to support our international students.”
SEVIS, the Student and Exchange Visitor Information Systems, is the database that tracks international students’ compliance with their visa status. NCIC is the National Crime Information Center, which is maintained by the FBI. Many of the students whose records were terminated were told that their status was terminated as a result of a criminal records check or that their visa had been revoked.
International students and their schools were caught off guard by the terminations of the students’ records. Many of the terminations were discovered when school officials were doing routine checks of the international student database or when they checked specifically after hearing about other terminations.
Contributing: Kade Heather