Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healy says ICE’s new policy is “egregious, irresponsible and … [+]
This morning, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healy, along with attorneys general from 17 other states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, filed suit in Boston federal court against the Trump Administration. The lawsuit defies a policy announced last week by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service, known as ICE, that would prohibit hundreds of thousands of foreign students from studying in the US if their programs are offered in line only this fall due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The lawsuit, which asks the court to block the rule with an immediate court order, calls the new policy “cruel, abrupt and illegal.”
Before the coronavirus pandemic, ICE did not issue F-1 visas to foreign students enrolled in online programs. But when the virus forced schools to close in March, ICE took no action to deport students who had to complete the term online. Last Monday, Acting Assistant Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, defended the new rule on CNN. “If they are not going to be students or are going to be 100% online, then they have no basis to be here,” he said. “They should go home, and then they can come back when the school opens.”
The lawsuit states that the administration issued the rule after most colleges and universities have passed months before reaching final plans for the fall that they believe are the best way for their institutions to keep students, teachers and personal safe from the virus. He says institutions now face a “dying dilemma.” Just a few weeks before the period begins, they must find a way to offer a sufficient number of face-to-face classes for their international students “regardless of the public health impact of doing so.”
If foreign students cannot enroll as planned this fall, schools will lose “hundreds of millions of dollars” at a time when higher education institutions are already under great financial pressure, the complaint says. Beyond the financial impact for schools, the complaint says international students contributed more than $ 14 billion to the nation’s economy in 2019.
The other states joining the lawsuit are Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Virginia.
On July 8, two days after ICE issued the rule, Harvard and MIT were the first institutions to file a lawsuit. Like the Massachusetts state lawsuit, that action is pending in Boston federal district court. More than 50 schools, including Princeton and Penn, have filed an amicus brief in that lawsuit, as has the Alliance of Presidents on Higher Education and Immigration, on behalf of 180 institutions. A hearing in that case is scheduled for tomorrow.
Separately, the state of California filed a similar lawsuit in federal court in northern California on Thursday. It also asks for a court order to block the rule’s application.
All of the lawsuits say ICE violated the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946. which requires the government to notify expected changes to the rules, allow the public to comment, and provide a clear explanation of the need for the new rule. In mid-June, the US Supreme Court based its rejection of the Trump Administration’s plan to end the DACA program on a claim under the Administrative Procedures Act.
