Trump admin reinstates international student visas, ICE sets rules for terminations

File photo of students awaiting their turn for visa interview during the annual Student Visa Day event, at the US Embassy in New Delhi.

The Trump administration on Friday restored the student visa registrations of potentially thousands of foreign students in the US, whose legal status abruptly terminated.

News agency AP quoted a lawyer saying that the federal government was reversing the termination of legal status for international students after many filed court challenges around the US.

Judges around the country had already issued temporary orders restoring the students' records in a federal database of international students maintained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

Trump has launched a crackdown on higher education in recent weeks, accusing universities including Columbia and Harvard of allowing anti-Semitism on their campuses.

In response more than 130 international students across the United States have joined a federal lawsuit accusing the Trump administration of unlawfully canceling their visas, jeopardizing their legal status in the country.

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.

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.

Elizabeth D. Kurlan, an attorney for the Justice Department said during the hearing in the Northern District of California that records for international students will be reactivated for the time being, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement crafts a new policy that will “provide a framework for status record termination,” reported NBC News.

More than 1.1 million international students attended college or university in the United States during the 2023/24 academic year, a record figure, according to a report published by the State Department's educational bureau and the Institute of International Education.

Now Trump is aggressively targeting top universities where students protested over Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza, cutting off federal funds and directing immigration officers to deport student demonstrators, including those with green cards.