What Is Trump Administration's New Policy To Target Foreign Students In US

NDTV

01-05-2025

Washington:
Amid a wider crackdown on immigration, the Trump Administration in the United States is expanding the ways to strip international students, including Indians, of their legal status to stay in stay and study in the country. Attorneys for international students, who came under the government's radar, said the Trump administration's new policy allows for quicker deportations and serves to justify many of the actions the government took to cancel foreign students' permission to study in the US.
Now, if a student's visa is cancelled for some reason, they will lose the right to continue their studies or job in the US, according to a report by Associated Press.
Earlier, the rules said that if a student's visa was revoked, they would generally be allowed to stay in the US to finish school. They would simply not be able to reenter the US if they left the country.
Court Filings Shed Light On Policies
The new details emerged during the proceedings of lawsuits filed by some of the students who suddenly had their status cancelled in recent weeks with little explanation. In many cases, judges made preliminary rulings that the government acted without due process.
Then the government told the court that it would issue new guidelines for cancelling a student's legal status. Following this, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement document shared on Monday in a court filing said valid reasons now include the revocation of the visas students used to enter the US.
"This just gave them carte blanche to have the State Department revoke a visa and then deport those students, even if they've done nothing wrong," said Brad Banias, an immigration attorney representing a student who lost his status in the crackdown, told AP.
Banias said the new guidelines vastly expand the authority of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) beyond its previous policy, which did not count visa revocation as grounds to take away a student's permission to be in the country.
The new guidance also allows the Trump administration to revoke students' status if their names appear in a criminal or fingerprint database in a way that was not permitted in the past, said Charles Kuck, an Atlanta-based immigration attorney.
Thousands Of Students Targeted
According to the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), ICE has terminated SEVIS (Student and Exchange Visitor Information System) records of as many as 4,736 international students since January 20, 2025, the majority of whom are Indians. Chinese, Nepalese, South Korean, and Bangladeshi students have also been targeted by the administration.
SEVIS is an online database used by schools to provide legally required information about international students to the government. If a student's SEVIS record is terminated, they lose the legal status to continue their study or work under the Optional Practical Training (OPT) programme in the US.
A common thread for most of the students who were targeted by the Trump administration was that at some point, they had contact with law enforcement. In most cases, these students either have traffic tickets or have violated university regulations. For some, even the charges were dropped, and they had no legal record.
How Trump Administration Labelled Students As Criminals
In court filings and at the hearing, Department of Homeland Security officials said they ran the names of student visa holders through the National Crime Information Centre, an FBI-run database that contains reams of information related to crimes.
These records include the names of suspects, missing persons and people who have been arrested, even if they have never been charged with a crime or had charges dropped.
Government officials acknowledged in court that they did not follow the basic 'innocent until proven guilty' foundation of US law and launched the mass exercise without individual reviews.
In total, about 6,400 students were identified in the database search, US District Judge Ana Reyes said Tuesday at the hearing.