Student Visa Revocation: Confussion and Chaos For International Students
By: Nicolas Leon Guzman
Recently, many international students have had their student visas terminated without warning or reason. Over a hundred colleges have seen their international students’ records disappear from the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS). SEVIS is an online system used by the Department of Homeland Security to track international students who come to the U.S. to attend school. More than 1,000 students have been affected by this recent development and will have to leave the country within 15 days of their visa termination. Historically, students are allowed to keep their legal residency status, but are limited in leaving and returning to the United States, but some of these international students have been snatched by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and taken to deportation centers.
For an international student to have their visa terminated, they must have committed a grave offense or crime, but it has come out that many of these students’ “crimes” were mainly some kind of traffic violation, such as speeding or parking tickets, while others didn’t have any at all. In some cases, others had misdemeanors that were later dismissed and expunged by the judge coming back to bite them. It seems that some of the students who had their visas terminated were part of political protest and that could be a reason for their visas getting revoked. However, if true, it could be a violation of their First Amendment right to protest and express their views. It’s important to point out that the First Amendment does not apply only to U.S. citizens. It protects the rights of freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly and petition for all individuals within the United States, regardless of their citizenship status.
Last week in a letter from the president of Virginia Tech, Tim Sands said, “that three undergraduate, four graduate students and two alumni have had their SEVIS records terminated, which generally means they must leave the U.S. immediately.” It seems that Virginia Tech does not know why these terminations happened and are trying to get in communication with the Department of Homeland Security. WSLS, a news organization, interviewed Andrew Sutherland, a junior at Virginia Tech, and this is what he had to say: “It just seems like even the university itself doesn’t really know what’s going on, and that in itself is really scary because that just means at a federal level that the communication has been so poor.”
This has led to University leaders worrying that the arrests and visa terminations could discourage students overseas from pursuing colleges in the United States. In the previous year, 1.1 million foreign students came to the U.S. to pursue their college degree. International students are unable to receive financial aid from the U.S. government, so often they pay full out-of-state tuition for their degree. International students bring in millions of dollars in tuition revenue and help keep many graduate programs afloat. Colleges have emphasized travel precautions to students, recommending they carry their passports and other immigration documents with them. Without these documents they could be arrested by ICE agents and deported.
In turn, many students are filing lawsuits against the Trump administration for not receiving due process. Last Friday, a class action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) seeks to represent more than 100 students in New England and Puerto Rico, asking a federal court to reinstate the legal status of international students. Federal judges have granted temporary restraining orders in New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Montana, shielding students from efforts to remove them from the U.S. until further action is taken.
