Expanded Grounds For The Cancellation Of U.S. Student Visa

The federal government has just expanded the number of reasons international students can be stripped of their legal status in the U.S., where thousands have come under scrutiny in President Donald Trump administration's crackdown.

Attorneys for international students say the new reasons allow for quicker deportations and serve to justify many of the actions the government took this spring to cancel foreign students' permission to study in the U.S.

After abruptly losing their legal status in recent weeks with little explanation, students around the country filed challenges in federal courts. In many cases, judges made preliminary rulings that the government acted without due process.

Then the government said it would issue new guidelines for canceling a student's legal status. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) document shared last 28 April in a court filing said valid reasons now include the revocation of the visas students used to enter the U.S.

In the past, if a student's visa was revoked, they generally could stay in the U.S. to finish school. They simply would not be able to reenter if they left the country.

"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. The student was once charged with a traffic offense, which appeared in a law enforcement database searched by immigration authorities.

Banias said the new guidelines vastly expand the authority of 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.

In the past month, foreign students around the U.S. have been rattled to learn their records were removed from a student database maintained by ICE. Some went into hiding for fear of deportation or abandoned their studies to return home.

The new guidance allows for revoking 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 who has filed a lawsuit on behalf of 133 people in the U.S. on student visas who lost their legal status.

While the Department of Homeland Security was revoking students’ legal status, the State Department was canceling the visas some students used to enter the country.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he canceled some visas because of student involvement in pro-Palestinian protests, which he says hurt U.S. foreign policy interests. But he acknowledged in March that some of the cancellations were "unrelated to any protests" and were "just having to do with potential criminal activity."

"My standard: If we knew this information about them before we gave them a visa, would we have allowed them in?" Rubio told reporters in March. "If the answer is no, then we revoke the visa."