“Despite no criminal convictions nor immigration violations and having never participated in any protest in the United States or elsewhere, these students were told that due to the termination of their student status, they are ‘expected to depart the United States immediately,’” the ACLU of Montana said.
International students in New England and Puerto Rico have filed a lawsuit alleging that the Trump administration’s far-ranging termination of F-1 visas is patently unlawful.
According to The Associated Press, the lawsuit was filed earlier this week by attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union. In total, the ACLU is representing more than 100 individual plaintiffs.
Gilles Bissonnette, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire, told The Associated Press that it is high time for the Trump administration to be held accountable for its misconduct.
“International students are a vital community in our state’s universities, and no administration should be allowed to circumvent the law to unilaterally strip students of status, disrupt their studies, and put them at risk of deportation,” Bissonnette said in a statement.
The Associated Press estimates that about 1,100 students at more than 170 colleges and universities nationwide have been stripped of their legal status and subject to either deportation or removal proceedings.
Many of the affected students say that the rapid-fire pace of the deportations has made it difficult to obtain legal counsel and exercise their legal rights, effectively depriving them of due process.
Federal judges in several students, including New Hampshire, Montana, and Wisconsin, have already issued orders temporarily prohibiting the Trump administration from deporting certain students.
In the lawsuit, the ACLU alleges that many of its clients received notice, without any warning, that their F-1 student visa statuses had been terminated. One of the plaintiffs, an Indian national, was about to finish a master’s degree program at Rivier University in New Hampshire; another, a Chinese citizen, says that visa restrictions prevent him from working as a research assistant.
The ACLU of Montana issued a separate statement asking the courts to reinstate the students’ legal statuses.
“Despite no criminal convictions nor immigration violations and having never participated in any protest in the United States or elsewhere, these students were told that due to the termination of their student status, they are ‘expected to depart the United States immediately,’” the ACLU of Montana said in a press release. “The lawsuit asks the court to reinstate these students’ F-1 student status, allowing them to continue their studies and avoid facing the risk of detention and deportation.”
John Roe, the pseudonym of an Iranian international student, received an undergraduate degree in physics from Azad University in Tehran before applying to and attending a graduate program at Auburn University in Alabama. Roe earned a master’s degree in experimental condensed matter physics in 2019, after which he began working on a doctorate in electrical engineering and physics from Montana State University.
Roe is only eight months away from obtaining his doctorate, but was recently told that his F-1 status had been terminated and that he is no longer allowed to continue working.
“Roe’s entire academic and professional identity is rooted in the path he built in the United States, and the possibility of losing that is devastating,” the ACLU wrote in the proposed class action. “The sudden revocation of his visa without any additional information and the risk it engenders to his future has left him feeling overwhelmed and deeply unsettled.”
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Lawsuit challenges Trump administration crackdown on international students
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