The Trump administration on Tuesday rescinded a policy that would have stripped the visas of international students whose courses move exclusively online amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The move comes after the policy’s announcement last week sparked a string of litigation, beginning with a lawsuit filed by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), followed by California’s public universities and later a coalition of 17 states, among other challenges.
Judge Allison Burroughs, a federal district judge in Boston who was presiding over the oral arguments in the Harvard-MIT case, made the surprise announcement at the start of court proceedings on Tuesday.
“The parties have informed me that they have reached a resolution,” Burroughs said, adding: “They will return to the status quo.”
Latest development cancels move The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE) announced last week that international students whose courses move entirely online would have to leave the country or transfer schools and reinstate an earlier plan to grant exemptions to holders of student visas.
In March, when the government rushed to prepare for the public health crisis, ICE offered a postponement to student visa holders, who normally must attend classes in person to stay in the country.
ICE was reversed with little warning last week, saying that any student visa holder in the US would have to leave the country if their schools had classes entirely online.
The Harvard-MIT lawsuit petitioned a Boston federal court for a temporary restraining order and a permanent court order against the administration’s new policy.
Her lawsuit alleged that ICE’s decision seemed designed to “compel universities to reopen classes in person,” increasing the risk of exposure to the coronavirus while scrambling carefully crafted plans to deliver online courses and endanger the lives of foreign students.
Universities accused the administration of committing several violations of a federal law known as the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which refers to how certain decision-making power resides in federal agencies. The problem was whether ICE’s new policy was legally justified or whether it was “arbitrary and capricious” and therefore illegal under the law.
The lawsuit leaned heavily on the Supreme Court’s decision last month to block the administration’s plan to end the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. In that case, most judges found that the government did not provide adequate justification for policy decisions as required by the APA.
The termination announced Tuesday marked another surprising turnaround in the Trump administration’s focus on student visas amid the pandemic. Until Monday, the administration maintained that it had exercised its legal discretion to change its policies regarding student visas.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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