A FEDERAL JUDGE SITTING IN OAKLAND announced that he will temporarily bar President Donald Trump’s administration from acting against international students based on the administration’s prior improper attempts to revoke their immigration status.
The judge granted relief to the plaintiffs but deferred ruling on whether to extend his order throughout the country.
The hearing arose in five cases involving approximately 25 plaintiffs that are being heard together because of common factual allegations. All the cases involve international students who are studying in the United States pursuant to F-1 visas.
Foreign nationals with F-1 visas are allowed to enter the country to pursue their studies and may remain as long as they are in a full-time program and otherwise complying with the requirements of the visa. They may work when it is a practical part of their studies and is approved in advance.
The lead plaintiff — identified only as “John Doe” — is a postgraduate who came to study in the Bay Area in 2019. His court filing does not identify which school. He obtained a graduate degree in 2023 and is currently working at a job that is permitted by his F-1 visa. He says his employer highly values his services and wants him to continue. He also says that his spouse is a U.S. citizen.
According to Doe, he learned from his graduate school that his “SEVIS” record had been terminated for “failure to maintain status.” SEVIS, or Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, is the tracking system that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses to track students with F-1 status.
According to the plaintiffs, there are approximately 1.3 million students studying in the U.S. pursuant to F-1 visas. The Trump administration ran the names of all F-1 holders against a list of people with some type of “negative” or “derogatory” information associated with their name. That match identified 16,000 F-1 holders and that number was then winnowed down to 6,400.
ICE then began to terminate their SEVIS record in batches, according to the plaintiffs’ lawyer Johnny Sinodis.
ICE took the position that termination of a student’s SEVIS status essentially terminated their visas. The terminations reached roughly 4,700 students before backlash and litigation forced the administration to halt the process.
The plaintiffs argued the SEVIS terminations were unlawful. According to court filings, many of the terminations were based on matters that would not be grounds for termination and were done “en masse” without individualized consideration of the circumstances. The plaintiffs alleged that the termination of SEVIS status violated federal law and that the government then compounded the problem by improperly using the SEVIS termination as grounds for terminating the students’ visas.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White had previously entered a temporary restraining order pending a full hearing. Wednesday’s hearing was to determine if the restraining order should be converted to a preliminary injunction that would remain in place until a final decision in the case, something that might take a year or more.
Arguments focused on the propriety of injunctive relief in light of the government’s assurances that it had restored the SEVIS status of each of the plaintiffs.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Elizabeth Kurlan, representing the government, offered the court assurances that ICE was in the process of issuing a letter to all of the terminated students stating that their SEVIS status was restored and it would be “as if the revocation never occurred.”
The plaintiffs argued that the letter was not binding on ICE or the other departments of the government, and could not prevent their clients from being taken by ICE and sent out of the country — perhaps to El Salvador — without notice or an opportunity to contest the decision.
Gov’t excuses ‘hard to believe’
In the polite language of courtroom argument, the plaintiffs’ lawyers said the government lawyers’ assurances were “not binding on their clients” and could not be relied upon.
They said that the SEVIS system should be immediately programmed to include information that not only was the termination vacated but also that the period of termination would be rendered of no moment, so an employer or school or agency accessing system information would know that it was without any legal force or effect.
The government’s lawyers made a valiant attempt to explain that the SEVIS system could not programmed to add a field of information to that effect. They said it was not technologically “doable,” would take weeks or even longer to do the work, and could even impair the integrity and security of the entire SEVIS system.
In court, the plaintiffs’ attorney Sinodis delicately suggested that those statements were “hard to believe.” Outside of court, talking to reporters, he said that in his opinion, the government’s argument was “bogus.”
The sharpest disagreement during argument related to the geographic scope of any injunction.
According to the plaintiffs’ lawyers, dozens of such cases are pending around the country, but as of Wednesday none had yet resulted in a nationwide injunction. They argued that a nationwide injunction was needed because the violation of law applied to people throughout the United States and many would not be protected by orders in individual suits.
Nationwide injunctions are a flashpoint with the Trump administration, which believes that when they lose a case, the court order should only apply to the specific parties to the case, not to all people similarly situated throughout the country. The administration has repeatedly raised the issue in other cases and coincidentally the nationwide injunction issue is set to be argued — albeit in a different context — before the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday.
White ruled in plaintiffs favor on the need for injunctive relief.
He found the plaintiffs had met their burden of showing both a likelihood of success in the case and that they would be irreparably injured if an injunction was not entered. That made it appropriate for him to enter a preliminary injunction so that the status quo — that is the state of affairs before the SEVIS service was terminated — would be fully restored and preserved as the case goes forward.
Perhaps wanting to see how the Supreme Court deals with the issue, White stopped short of entering a nationwide injunction. He said that he was still studying the issue and would decide it later.