For three weeks, the federal government upended the lives of many international students by simply terminating their immigration statuses in a database. Some lost jobs. Some decided to self-deport rather than face deportation.
Others fought back. Attorneys filed at least 65 lawsuits on behalf of hundreds of international students whose records were terminated from the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), according to an analysis by The Washington Post. In many cases, judges ruled against the government, saying the argument for terminating the student files was meritless.
Then, on Friday, the Department of Homeland Security said it had paused deactivating student files and would restore the SEVIS records for now.
“It hasn’t really hit me yet,” said Brian Green, the Denver-area attorney representing an American University student in a case heard Friday in U.S. District Court in D.C.
Colleges and universities use SEVIS as proof of a student’s legal status to remain in the country. There were about 1.1 million international students in the U.S. during the 2023-2024 school year, according to federal data. The American Immigration Lawyers Association estimates that at least 4,700 international students have had their SEVIS records terminated since Jan. 20.
The SEVIS database statuses were terminated as President Donald Trump’s administration works to deport noncitizen students who it determines to have participated in pro-Palestinian campus protests, engaged in antisemitism or supported Hamas. Last month, after immigration officers began detaining students who protested Israel’s war in Gaza, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that federal officials had already revoked many visas and would continue to do so.
DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said all visa revocations are still in effect. “We have not reversed course on a single visa revocation. What we did is restore SEVIS access for people who had not had their visa revoked,” she said.
There were early indicators the government was backing down from the SEVIS terminations. Michael E. Piston, an attorney representing students in a SEVIS case, and other attorneys across the country said clients began reporting Thursday evening that their SEVIS statuses were being restored.
Piston and other attorneys said that the government’s lawyers couldn’t describe the legal basis that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was using to remove people from SEVIS. “I think the government realizes now that their position is entirely legally untenable,” Piston said.
ICE did not respond to a request for comment.
Attorneys who filed suit against the government, including against DHS, said they noticed that their clients all had interacted with law enforcement before seeing their SEVIS file terminated. Some had low-level interactions with police, such as a parking or speeding ticket that was promptly paid. But one attorney said one of his clients, a woman, had only one interaction with police – reporting that she was the victim of alleged domestic violence.
Some immigration lawyers said the database was being used to encourage foreign students to self-deport.
Asked about the SEVIS terminations, a senior DHS official told The Post on Thursday: “Individuals who remain in the U.S. without lawful immigration status may be subject to arrest and removal. For such individuals, the safest and most efficient option is self-deportation.”
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) said the administration was weaponizing its database. “Trump’s reversal – in the face of multiple lawsuits and enormous pressure – is a clear admission that these actions against students were never about national security, but rather about using immigration enforcement as a weapon to restrict due process, stifle political dissent and attack legal immigration,” she said.
SEVIS termination often leads to visa revocation, loss of employment authorization, and even deportation proceedings, lawyers said. Some of the official notices sent to students recommended they leave the U.S. immediately.
Seattle-based attorney Jay Gairson said, contrary to DHS’s statement that SEVIS status was not restored for people with revoked visas, he has two clients whose visas were revoked and their SEVIS statuses were reinstated Friday.
“I don’t know what to say to DHS,” he said.
The SEVIS database is often updated, either by a designated university employee or by an official for DHS or ICE.
University officials were doing their daily checks of the database around April 4 when they first found a mass number of students were no longer active, according to attorneys.
One of the deactivated student files belonged to Anjan Roy, a computer science graduate student from Bangladesh studying at Missouri State University. He immediately went into hiding. The 23-year-old shut off his phone, told his roommates not to answer the door and went to stay with a cousin off campus.
His parents told him to come home. But he feared doing so would taint his record. “I convinced them I should fight this,” he said. “I know that what they did was unconstitutional.”
His Atlanta-based attorney, Charles Kuck, sued on behalf of Roy and 132 others, restoring their SEVIS statuses earlier this month. “They want them to leave,” Kuck said. “This is, writ large, a Trump attack on legal immigrants.”
ICE never told Roy why his SEVIS was terminated. But Roy suspects it’s because he was fingerprinted by police who he called after a dispute with his girlfriend in 2021, even though he was never charged or convicted of a crime.
“I think what the government wanted to do was create a fear among the international students and they did, they made their point,” he said Friday. “Technically they kind of won. Their intention was to create this fear, and they created this fear.”
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