Several hundred foreign students throughout the country have had their visas or legal status revoked.
Four American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) affiliates filed a lawsuit on April 18 asking a federal court to reinstate the legal status of international students who have had their visas revoked.
Multiple ACLU affiliates and the law firm Shaheen & Gordon filed a federal class action lawsuit representing more than 100 foreign students in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island, and Puerto Rico who they say had their F-1 student immigration status “unlawfully and abruptly terminated with no specified reason as to why.”
The students include several at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, who had their student status revoked in recent weeks. The lawsuit asks the court to reinstate their F-1 student status, which would allow them to continue their studies.
“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,” Gilles Bissonnette, legal director of the ACLU of New Hampshire, said in a statement.
Several students have already sued, arguing they were denied due process. In New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Montana, federal judges have granted temporary restraining orders to shield the students from deportation.
According to the April 18 lawsuit, which was filed in New Hampshire federal court, the affected students said they were not notified before their F-1 student statuses were canceled, opening them up to deportation and preventing them from finishing their studies.
The complaint states that one of the students, Manikanta Pasula of India, was close to finishing his master’s in computer science at New Hampshire’s Rivier University and was working to apply for an international student work program that would allow him to stay in the United States.
Another student, Hangrui Zhang of China, was in a Ph.D. program in electronic and computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, and says he now can no longer work as a research assistant, his only income source, the complaint said.
By Jacob Burg
