The Trump Administration agreed to rescind rules it issued last week barring international students from being in the U.S. if they were taking classes online only.
The action was announced Tuesday and temporarily resolved lawsuits filed by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The University of California also sued the federal government over the new visa policy.
The UC lawsuit sought a temporary restraining order and preliminary and permanent injunctive relief to bar Immigration and Customs enforcement from enforcing the order, according to a UC news release.
According to 2019 fall enrollment data, 27,205 of UC’s 226,125 undergraduate students are non-resident international, while nearly 14,000 of the University’s 58,941 graduate students are also international.
“At a time when college students across America are struggling to deal with the challenges and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic while focusing on their studies, this capricious and illegal order from the federal government plunges them into deeper anxiety and uncertainty,” UC President Janet Napolitano said in a statement July 8. “It is illegal, unnecessary and callous.”
— Mitchell White
