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Hey, the federal government just did a 180, and announced in court that it’s going to quit going around deleting students’ visa registrations! Until Immigration and Customs Enforcement comes up with a new policy that will “provide a framework for status record termination,” anyway. But in the meantime, one more setback for Trump’s mass-deportation machine.
Starting sometime in March, the State Department under son-of-immigrants Marco Rubio has been mass-deleting visa registrations of more than 4,700 foreign students with F-1 visas at more than 250 universities and colleges, and setting the students’ status to “inactive” in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, a web database used by ICE’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) to track nonimmigrant students and visitors. Without an active status, students can’t enroll in school and access university housing and so on, they become a digital persona non grata.
Simply marking someone “inactive” in the system is not the same thing as revoking their permission to be here, or a judge telling someone to leave. Visas allow someone to enter the country, but a student can continue to stay in the US with a lawful status, even after their visa expires. Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to be. Even ICE’s own web page advises students, “You can stay in the United States on an expired F-1 visa as long as you maintain your student status.”
Nevertheless, some of those students with revoked visas got letters demanding that they leave the country anyway, with threats to deport them to countries other than their countries of origin if they didn’t leave on their own. Like perhaps a Central American country with a good supermax prison. Other students or their colleges were not notified of a status change at all, and only found out after they or their schools checked their status online.
Some students seemed to have been flagged for removal in the system for minor infractions like a speeding ticket or fishing without a license. And about 1,400 students have also had their visas revoked on top of having their status changed to “inactive,” some for WRONGTHINK reasons, such as allegedly attending demonstrations or publicly expressing support for Palestinians, though again, also some for no apparent reason at all. Authoritarians love arbitrariness, really keeps everybody on their toes!
The whole shitshow situation created a mess that one judge called “Schrödinger’s visa,” with students here both legally and not. This led to courtroom exchanges like the one reported by Baniaslaw on Xitter:
THE COURT: Do you realize that this is Kafkaesque? I’ve got two experienced immigration lawyers on behalf of a client who is months away from graduation, who has done nothing wrong, who has been terminated from a system that you all keep telling me has no effect on his immigration status, although that clearly is BS. And now his two experienced lawyers can’t even tell him whether or not he’s here legally, because the Court can’t tell him whether or not he’s here legally, because the government’s counsel can’t tell him if he’s here legally.
And it was quickly becoming clear that the government was going to keep losing. On Tuesday a federal judge in Georgia ordered that 133 students have their statuses restored, and a similar case is pending in New Hampshire.
With the writing on the wall, Justice Department attorney Elizabeth D. Kurlan announced during a hearing in the Northern District of California in Oakland on Friday that the government won’t be deleting records any more, reading from a written statement she was authorized to make on ICE’s behalf.
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 reactivated if not currently active, and ICE will not modify the record solely based on the NCIC [National Crime Information Center] finding that resulted in the recent SEVIS record termination.
ICE maintains the authority to terminate a SEVIS record for other reasons, such as if the plaintiff fails to maintain his or her nonimmigrant status after the record is reactivated or engages in other unlawful activity that would render him or her removable from the United States under the Immigration and Nationality Act.
And magically, over the past few days, some students whose records were deleted found that they had been restored, with no explanation given, though others haven’t been.
It’s still a mess for the students. Some have already left the country. Some have been restored in the system but still had their visas revoked, making it uncertain if they could get OOPS arrested anyway, legal status or not. And still having a visa revocation on their record can make students ineligible to apply again. And all of the foreign students are understandably in a state of freakout and uncertainty.
Still, it’s something!
[Al Jazeera / NBC]
