Trump & Co. making their last grasps before the election….
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced Monday that international students in the U.S. whose schools switch to online classes for the fall semester will have to leave the country or risk violating their visa status.
Under the new rule, foreign nationals enrolled in U.S. educational institutions will have to leave the country unless part of their course load this fall is taken in-person.
The Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) had allowed for foreign students to take their spring and summer 2020 courses online while remaining in the United States, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
SEVP, the institution that sets the rules for student visas, is run by ICE, which is generally dedicated to immigration enforcement.
In its announcement, SEVP said foreign students who do not transfer to in-person programs and remain in the United States while enrolled in online courses could face “immigration consequences including, but not limited to, the initiation of removal proceedings.”
Students taking in-person programs will be allowed to remain in the country, while schools with hybrid online/in-person courses will be required to certify their programs are not entirely online….
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According to the Commerce Department, international students contributed $45 billion to the U.S. economy in 2018. …
Hillary Clinton in a tweet on Tuesday called a decision by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to require international students to leave the U.S. or risk violating their visa status if their schools switch to online classes in the fall “cruel” and “unnecessary.”
“This move is cruel, unnecessary, and counterproductive to America’s long-term interests. A Trump administration special,” Clinton said….
Update…
Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sued the Trump administration in federal court on Wednesday, seeking to block a directive that would strip foreign college students of their visas if their coursework was entirely online.
The universities argued that the policy, announced on Monday, was politically motivated and would throw higher education into chaos. It was widely seen as an effort by the White House to pressure universities into reopening and abandoning the cautious approaches that many have announced they would adopt to reduce Covid-19 transmission.
Harvard is planning to teach its classes entirely online, and many other universities are planning a hybrid model, with some in-person instruction but mostly online classes…
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The two universities said that the new directive would prevent many of Harvard’s 5,000 international students — and hundreds of thousands of students at other universities across the country — from staying in the United States….
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Update….
Seventeen states and the District of Columbia sued the Trump administration on Monday, seeking to block a new rule that would revoke the visas of foreign students who take classes entirely online in the fall.
The rule, issued a week ago, would upend months of careful planning by colleges and universities, the lawsuit says, and could force many students to return to their home countries during the pandemic, where their ability to study would be severely compromised.
“The Trump administration didn’t even attempt to explain the basis for this senseless rule, which forces schools to choose between keeping their international students enrolled and protecting the health and safety of their campuses,” Maura Healey, the Massachusetts attorney general, said in a statement announcing the suit, which accuses the administration of violating the Administrative Procedure Act.
More…
(A court injection/stay would delay this until after Jan 20, 2021 and a Biden admin change…)
Update on this here…