State sues to keep students in U.S.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced Thursday that he is filing a lawsuit, on behalf of the California State University system and the state’s community colleges, challenging the Trump administration’s new policy that could force international students to leave the country during the upcoming fall term.
Becerra, appearing at virtual news conference, said the suit would be filed Thursday afternoon in the Northern district of California.
“It is clear to those of us who observe the Trump administration and understand the law,” Becerra said. “What Donald Trump has tried to do in this regard will fail, because it is against the law.”
This latest legal action punctuated a frenzied, furious response to the new guidelines disclosed Monday by the federal government. University of California officials announced Wednesday that the system will file its own lawsuit.
Harvard and MIT also filed a lawsuit in federal court Wednesday, and Stanford announced it would join those schools in filing an amicus brief.
Monday’s announcement by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — made at the direction of the Department of Homeland Security — mandates that students attending schools “operating entirely online” may not take a full course load and remain in the
U.S. The State Department will not issue visas to students enrolled in programs that are fully online this fall.
Most Bay Area colleges and universities, including UC Berkeley and Stanford, are adopting a hybrid model for the fall, with the majority of classes offered remotely and limited courses available in person. If the pandemic forces all instruction online, as it did this past
“What Donald Trump has tried to do in this regard will fail.”
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra
spring, thousands of students in the Bay Area could be affected.
The new policy has created anxiety for international students attending local universities.
“I think it’s about creating chaos and also about forcing the universities to reopen,” said Be, a UC Berkeley graduate student from Germany who declined to give a last name. “They fear losing a lot of international student undergraduate tuition . ...
“There is also a xenophobic element in this; they want to cleanse the university of anything socalled foreign . ... But what I’m concerned about is being constantly, completely dependent on these very irrational, unclear guidelines, and about basic mobility.”
UC Berkeley had 6,833 international students enrolled for the fall 2019 semester, according to data provided by the university.
San Jose State had 3,081 international students last fall; San Francisco State had 1,059 this spring; and
USF currently has about 900. Stanford did not provide its total of international students.
School leaders universally blasted the Trump administration for this week’s guidelines.
“Asking international students to transfer or leave the country — not to mention navigate the travel restrictions in place in many countries around the world, and risk the possibility they may not be able to return — is misguided and harmful,” Stanford President Marc TessierLavigne wrote in an email to the campus community Wednesday.
Cal State Chancellor Timothy White, in a statement Thursday, said, “It is a callous and inflexible policy that unfairly disrupts our more than 10,300 international students’ progress to a degree, unnecessarily placing them in an extremely difficult position.”