A federal court has blocked the Donald Trump administration from arbitrarily deleting information related to the immigration status of international students and revoking their visas.
According to the Washington Post (WP) on the 22nd, the Northern District of California federal court issued an injunction that day prohibiting the Trump administration from depriving international students of their status until the main lawsuit is concluded.
The court pointed out that the deletion of records of about 20 plaintiffs registered in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) by the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “was likely an arbitrary action that exceeded its authority.”
SEVIS is a student information management system managed by the Department of Homeland Security that assigns individual codes to international students in the United States. It was introduced to strengthen background checks on international students after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Current law states that international students can be deprived of their status if they provide false information to the Department of Homeland Security or are convicted of a violent crime punishable by more than one year in prison.
Normally, the university was responsible for deleting student information from SEVIS, but since the Trump administration took office, ICE has arbitrarily deleted the information of thousands of international students, which has become a problem. Accordingly, lawsuits have been filed across the United States recently to cancel SEVIS record deletions, and at least 200 international students have reportedly obtained injunctions in court.
On this day, the Northern District of California issued a nationwide injunction, stating that ICE’s act of deleting SEVIS records itself was problematic, and as a result, the federal government cannot arrest or detain international students or revoke their visas while the trial is ongoing.
According to the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), it is estimated that at least 4,700 cases of international student records being deleted since President Trump took office.