Trump Admin Drops International Students Deportation Policy

President Donald Trump’s administration has reversed course on its directive that international students not attending class in person be barred from the United States.

The decision was announced by a Massachusetts judge Tuesday, a little over a week after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that students attending schools offering only online courses due to the coronavirus pandemic would have to transfer or be forced to leave the U.S., CNN reported.

The court said the Trump administration has agreed to revert to a rule implemented in March that allowed international students to attend all classes online during the pandemic, according to USA Today. 

Another source told CNN that the White House is considering having the rule apply only to new students; the White House declined to comment.

Schools at all levels of education have made the move to providing solely online classes in an effort to combat the spread of COVID-19.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), maintaining distance from other people is one of the best ways to help stop the transmission of COVID-19.

The CDC’s guidance says “virtual-only activities, events, and gatherings” are the lowest-risk activities for those wanting to avoid the disease. 

More risk is involved in situations where groups gather in-person but maintain a social distance of six feet, while gatherings at highest risk are those that occur in an environment that make social distancing difficult or impossible.

The recent announcement by ICE that students could be deported if not attending in-person classes during the fall 2020 semester was made July 8. 

“The U.S. Department of State will not issue visas to students enrolled in schools and/or programs that are fully online for the fall semester nor will U.S. Customs and Border Protection permit these students to enter the United States,” the directive read. “Active students currently in the United States enrolled in such programs must depart the country or take other measures, such as transferring to a school with in-person instruction to remain in lawful status or potentially face immigration consequences including, but not limited to, the initiation of removal proceedings.”

Students attending schools holding a mixture of online and in-person classes would have been allowed to take more than one class online; however, the schools would have been required to certify to the government that the student was not taking only online courses, the ICE announcement said.

Students outside the U.S. who were enrolled at a school only offering online coursework would have been allowed to “engage in remote learning from their home country,” according to ICE.

The policy change was met with a slew of lawsuits.

Seventeen states and the District of Columbia sued the federal government, as did law students at the University of California Irvine and several universities, including Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Johns Hopkins.

Several corporations and groups, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, the American Federation of Teachers and the Service Employees International Union announced their support for Harvard and MIT’s lawsuit, Politico reported.

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, who led the lawsuit filed by the states, and other attorneys general had argued that the administration’s decision to ban international students would cause chaos both for institutions and students.

In their lawsuit, the attorneys general asked the court for a preliminary injunction halting the policy, claiming the Trump administration failed to provide justification for the policy’s implementation.

According to court documents, the Trump administration insisted its plan would have offered schools flexibility to restart operations while also balancing public health concerns and national security, Politico reported.

“A solely online program of study provides a nonimmigrant student with enormous flexibility to be present anywhere in the United States for up to an entire academic term, whether that location has been reported to the government, which raises significant national security concerns,” the government argued in court documents this week, according to Politico.

California was the first state to challenge the policy.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said in his lawsuit that as of January, the state had more than 184,000 international students at colleges and universities, more than any other state in the U.S. 

CNN estimates there are more than 1 million international students in the United States.

Do you agree with the decision to allow international students to remain in the U.S. if only attending online courses? Let us know in the comments.

The Trump International Student Visa Lawsuit is Commonwealth of Massachusetts, et al. v. United States Department of Homeland Security, et al., Case No. 1:20-cv-11311-ADB, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

The International Student Remote Learning Lawsuit is State of California v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, et al., Case No. 3:20- cv-04592, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

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