Dive Brief:
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A federal district judge in Georgia issued a temporary restraining order Friday blocking the Trump administration from terminating the legal status of 133 international students who had joined a lawsuit alleging that the government had violated their due process rights.
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Judge Victoria Marie Calvert granted the plaintiffs’ request to restore their F-1 student status and work authorizations. The plaintiffs alleged that the federal government had unlawfully terminated their legal status without giving them proper notice or an opportunity to respond.
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The ruling came the same day as a similar lawsuit, filed in New Hampshire, challenged the Trump administration’s mass cancellation of student visas, escalating the legal fight over the federal government’s treatment of international students.
Dive Insight:
As of Friday, the Trump administration had terminated the legal status of over 1,550 international students, according to a tally from Inside Higher Ed. Some of the revocations have targeted pro-Palestinian activists, but others have impacted students who weren’t involved in campus demonstrations.
According to the lawsuit filed in Georgia, international students were notified that their records were terminated in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or SEVIS, a federal database that monitors international students. SEVIS attributed the decisions to a criminal records check, visa revocation or both. However, the plaintiffs don’t have criminal histories, according to court documents.
Calvert said the international students were likely to succeed in their arguments that the Trump administration overstepped its legal authority when it terminated their SEVIS records. Calvert pointed to students’ concerns that they would lose educational access, scholarships and career opportunities as a result of the terminations.
“Many Plaintiffs are mere weeks away from attaining their degrees,” Calvert wrote. “The loss of timely academic progress alone is sufficient to establish irreparable harm.”
Calvert’s order expires in early May.
The New Hampshire lawsuit makes similar arguments, alleging that the Trump administration has violated federal law and flouted international students’ due process rights by abruptly terminating their legal status.
The lawsuit, which is seeking to be certified as a class-action complaint, argued that the terminations have “severely disrupted the educational opportunities of students.”
One of the students, Linkhith Babu Gorrela, is slated to graduate in May, but he may not obtain his master’s diploma without legal status, according to the complaint. Another, Haoyang An, “will have to abandon” his graduate degree after being able to complete two other degrees in the U.S., the complaint stated.
The lawsuit asks the judge to permanently block the Trump administration from unlawfully terminating the legal status of international students studying in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island and Puerto Rico — the states and territories of the plaintiffs’ colleges.
Without judicial intervention, the students face potential detention and deportation.
On Friday, a federal judge also ordered government officials to transfer Rumeysa Ozturk, an international student at Tufts University, from a Louisiana correctional facility to Vermont. Plainclothes immigration authorities detained Ozturk in March after the Trump administration revoked her visa earlier that month. Ozturk has not been charged with a crime, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
In the ruling, Judge William Sessions III wrote that Ozturk’s evidence supported her argument that the federal government detained her “to punish her for co-authoring an op-ed in a campus newspaper.”
In the op-ed, published last year, Ozturk and others criticized the university administration for rejecting several resolutions passed by Tufts’ undergraduate student government. The resolutions included demands that the university “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and for Tufts to divest from companies with links to Israel, the op-ed stated.
Ozturk has argued that the Trump administration detained her to retaliate against political speech, violating her right to free speech and due process.
“The government has so far offered no evidence to support an alternative, lawful
motivation or purpose for Ms. Ozturk’s detention,” Sessions’ ruling wrote.
