Minor infractions lead to big problems for international students

Thousands of international students found their lives thrown into chaos in recent weeks by a Trump administration effort to flag their past brushes with law enforcement that left them unable to work or study in the U.S.

“This incident has affected my whole life,” said one man who recently got a master’s degree from the University of South Florida.

The man, who asked NPR not to use his name because he’s afraid of retaliation from immigration authorities, believes his troubles began with a minor traffic violation a few years ago, when he was charged with failing to yield to a police officer. The case was quickly dismissed after he explained to a judge that he had been waiting for a safe place to pull off the highway, he said.

But that single dismissed charge has upended his life anyway. He said he was forced to resign from his first job at the Florida Department of Revenue when the student visa registration that allowed him to continue his training and work was terminated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE.

“They have done irreparable damages already,” said the man, who has joined a lawsuit with other international students. “Like some people left the country. Some people left their studies. And in my case, I lost my job.”

Under President Trump’s immigration crackdown, any contact with law enforcement— no matter how small— can have big consequences for immigrants. That’s especially true for international students. 

After weeks of confusion, the Trump administration was compelled to confirm in court on April 29 that it terminated immigration records for thousands of international students because of past encounters with law enforcement, many of them minor.

As the records were terminated, many colleges and universities were unsure how to proceed. They turned to public guidance on a Department of Homeland Security website titled “Study in the States” that says students whose records are terminated lose their authorization to work, and either “apply for reinstatement” or “must leave the United States immediately.”

“So for getting a speeding ticket, they all of a sudden lost their visa status, were told they couldn’t go to class and that they had to leave the country immediately,” said Brad Banias, an immigration lawyer who’s representing more than 100 students in lawsuits against the Trump administration.

At least 60 of these lawsuits were filed across the country by international students, some just weeks from graduation.

All of these cases hinge on a little-known government database that is crucial to the lives of international students. It’s called the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or SEVIS. It was created after the 9/11 attacks to track international students, to make sure they’re going to class and complying with other federal visa requirements.

ICE abruptly terminated those crucial records for thousands of students with little notice or explanation, said Charles Kuck, an immigration lawyer who also represents over 100 students in lawsuits against the Trump administration.

“It’s quite clear that what ICE did here broke the law,” Kuck said. “They didn’t follow the regulations they themselves have published and the policy that themselves have published.”

On April 25, the Justice Department said ICE would reverse course and restore or planned to restore the records, at least for now. But by then, judges had already ruled against the administration in dozens of cases.

“They got tired of losing,” said Kuck.

During a federal court hearing last week the Trump administration finally confirmed what immigration lawyers had suspected.

Starting in March, officials at ICE ran the names of more than 1 million international students through the National Crime Information Center, a federal database that tracks crime-related information.

ICE came up with about 6,400 likely hits and then used that data to terminate thousands of SEVIS records. That’s according to court testimony from Andre Watson, an official with ICE’s Counter Threat Lead Development Unit.

The problem, immigration lawyers say, is that many of those hits were for minor brushes with the law— including traffic offenses, or cases where charges were later dropped or dismissed by police and courts.

It was one of Banias’s clients— Akshar Patel, a student at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee— whose case was heard in federal district court in Washington, D.C. last week.

The Department of Justice argued in court that terminating a student’s SEVIS record alone did not take away their legal status in the U.S., although that appeared to contradict the public guidance on DHS’ “Study in the States” website.

Judge Ana Reyes pushed ICE to explain what the termination of SEVIS records means and why it occurred. And she summoned Watson, the ICE official, to court last week to describe how this effort known informally inside the agency as the “Student Criminal Alien Initiative” worked.

The termination of SEVIS records was intended as a “red flag,” Watson said, so that schools and universities could then “determine if the student is still in compliance” with the terms of their visa.

But Reyes noted that ICE could have achieved that goal by simply communicating with the universities. And she seemed troubled by what she described as “zero due process” for students whose records were terminated.

“Each record was scrutinized based on the criminal history,” Watson said, according to a court transcript.

But Reyes was skeptical. She noted that Patel, the plaintiff in the case, had faced reckless driving charges that were ultimately dismissed. “You and I both know Mr. Patel is not a criminal, right? And anyone looking at the record would know that he’s not a criminal,” Reyes said.

“All of this could have been avoided if individuals had taken a beat, instead of just rushing things,” she said. “But that’s not happening.”

Immigrant advocates worry the Trump administration will try more efforts like this as it gathers more data about immigrants with and without legal status.

“ICE is completely comfortable painting anyone who has any interaction with the police as someone with a criminal record,” Banias said. “That’s the terrifying part.”

ICE did not reply to NPR’s request for comment.

A spokesperson for the State Department, which adjudicates student visas, did not respond to questions about the terminations.

But Secretary of State Marco Rubio has defended the administration’s aggressive push to revoke student visas and green cards from pro-Palestinian campus protesters and other international students.

“If you’re here on a student visa and you have a DUI or you have some other crime, that’s an automatic suspension,” Rubio said in an interview last month with the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. on his podcast, Triggered.

“That should be automatic. You commit a crime while you’re in this country, your visa’s gone. You didn’t tell us you were coming here to break the law. You told us you were coming here to study,” Rubio said.

A conviction for driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs can be grounds to revoke a student visa. But many of the law enforcement encounters that ICE used to justify these SEVIS terminations were far less serious.

When a Justice Department lawyer announced the students’ records would be restored, he also said the government would adopt a new formal policy for revoking records in the database going forward.

This new policy could make it far easier to strip students of their legal status.

An internal memo from the ICE office that handles SEVIS records, included in court filings last week, stated that ICE can terminate those records immediately after a student’s visa is revoked.

That would be a sharp change from past practice. Until now, revoking a student’s visa did not automatically terminate the SEVIS records. Even if their visa was revoked, they could still stay in the U.S. to finish school, although they would not be able to reenter if they left the country.

Some students are still wondering why they were flagged at all.

“I have not had any interaction with law enforcement in the seven plus years I’ve been in the U.S.,” said a post-doctoral student at Purdue University in Indiana, who spoke to NPR on the condition of anonymity because he is also worried about retaliation.

The student had been applying for faculty positions in this country. But now, he’s trying to line up a job in Europe. And he says he knows many other international students who are also looking to leave the U.S.

“It’s not obvious to me for what reason I could have been targeted,” he said. “And that’s sort of the scariest part because, like, you don’t know what you did.”