White House rescinds rule on foreign students
BOSTON — Facing eight federal lawsuits and opposition from hundreds of universities, the Trump administration Tuesday rescinded a rule that would have required international students to transfer or leave the country if their schools held classes entirely online because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The decision was announced at the start of a hearing in a federal lawsuit here brought by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs said federal immigration authorities agreed to pull the July 6 directive and “return to the status quo.”
A lawyer representing the Homeland Security Department and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said only that the judge’s characterization was correct.
The announcement brings relief to thousands of foreign students who’d been at risk of being deported from the country, along with hundreds of universities that were scrambling to reassess their plans for the fall in light of the policy.
With the policy rescinded, ICE will revert to a directive from March that suspended typical limits around online education for foreign students.
ICE didn’t immediately comment on the decision.
Harvard President Lawrence Bacow called it a “significant victory.”
“While the government may attempt to issue a new directive, our legal arguments remain strong and the court has retained jurisdiction, which would allow us to seek judicial relief immediately to protect our international students should the government again act unlawfully,” Bacow said in a statement.
Under the policy, international students in the U.S. would have been forbidden from taking all their courses online this fall.
New visas would not have been issued to students at schools planning to provide all classes online, which includes Harvard. Students already in the U.S. would have faced deportation if they didn’t transfer schools or leave the country voluntarily.
Even if an outbreak had forced colleges to move all their classes online during the semester, international students would have been forced to transfer to a school with campus instruction or leave the country.
The policy drew sharp backlash from higher education institutions, with more than 200 signing court briefs supporting the challenge by Harvard and MIT. Colleges said the policy would put students’ safety at risk and hurt schools financially.
Many schools rely on tuition from international students, and some stood to lose millions of dollars in revenue.
The unexpected decision was welcome news to students across the nation who’d been on edge.
“I feel relief,” said Andrea Calderon, a 29-year-old biology graduate student from Ecuador. “It would have been a very big problem if I had to leave the country right now.”
The City College of New York student said returning home would have made it much harder to finish her thesis and pursue a Ph.D. Internet access at home in Ecuador is spotty, she said, and going through the process to come back to the U.S. in the future would be too expensive.