Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant Homeland Security secretary, said ICE had not reversed course on any visa revocations but did “restore SEVIS access for people who had not had their visa revoked.”
Christina DiIorio Sterling, a spokesperson for the US attorney’s office in Massachusetts, said Friday that office is “reviewing guidance by ICE and working closely with them to determine next steps for the impacted cases in our district.”
But the reversal set off a fresh round of questions for students, professors, and others whose academic lives have been upended by President Trump’s hard-line stance on immigration. On Friday, lawyers and academics warned the reprieve could be temporary, and cautioned that further uncertainty lies ahead.
“This has been chaos that has generated a climate of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty,” said Miriam Feldblum, chief executive of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration. Her organization recently sued over the terminations, alleging they had no basis in federal regulation and violated the Fifth Amendment’s due process protections.
Judges around the country had already issued temporary orders restoring the records of some students to the SEVIS database.
Zhennan Yuan, a 24-year-old graduate student at Northeastern University in Boston whose legal status was abruptly “terminated” when ICE removed his records from SEVIS, was granted a temporary restraining order earlier this month barring the government from arresting or deporting him.
He said Northeastern alerted him Thursday that his SEVIS status was restored.
“I feel like it’s a solid win; it’s definitely a small step toward justice,” said Yuan. “I can finally say I’m here legally. I’m not worried about getting deported or getting arrested.”
In recent weeks, the Trump administration abruptly terminated the legal status of nearly 5,000 international students and scholars across the country, including scores in New England, according to the American Immigration Lawyers Association, setting off fears of deportations on campuses around the country.
Mahsa Khanbabai, a Massachusetts-based immigration lawyer, said the Trump administration was temporarily backing down “because of the huge mess that they made.”
“But make no mistake, they’re planning on continuing with this. As they said in their statement, they’re just now going to come up with a policy about how to destroy all of these students’ lives rather than doing it haphazardly as they have been,” she said.
Khanbabai said she has been in touch with up to 50 students who have been affected by the revocations, and who are now starting to see their statuses restored.
“We need to be really careful and cautious and be prepared that we’re going to have to continue the litigation when they finally come out with a new policy,” she said.
Khanbabai said she did not expect the reversal to apply to students whose visas were “terminated for their advocacy for Palestinian issues or other political, ideological, issues,” such as her client Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University student who had her visa revoked in March and is being detained by federal immigration authorities.
“The students that engaged in pro-Palestinian protests, we do not expect to see them be reinstated,” she said.
Others pointed out that this does not resolve the problems of those international students whose visas were also revoked, which is a different legal issue from their standing in the SEVIS database.
Tufts University said that as of late Friday morning three of nine students whose SEVIS records were terminated have been reactivated.
“The reactivated records were discovered through ongoing monitoring; the university was not notified by the government. We are continuing to monitor the situation,” Tufts spokesperson Patrick Collins said in a statement.
Officials at Boston University, Harvard, Rivier University, and the University of New Hampshire all said some international students had their SEVIS status restored.
Other international students whose standing in SEVIS was terminated are still awaiting clarity. For example, Dartmouth College doctoral student Xiaotian Liu has won a temporary reprieve from a federal judge after he was dropped from SEVIS.
But Gilles Bissonnette, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire, which is representing Liu, said it’s too soon to tell how the latest developments would affect similarly situated students.
“We will need to confirm in the coming days whether [affected students] who have not sued the government have their student status fully reactivated,” he said.
Feldblum said groups such as hers must press forward with their lawsuits since their questions about the administration’s underlying actions remain unresolved, and also because the reversal does not undo the harm inflicted on those students.
“Additionally, there is no assurance that the administration won’t try to reinstate the policy in the future,” Feldblum said.
Indeed, some advocates fear that some of the effects from Trump’s actions against international students are irreversible.
Julia Gelatt, associate director of the US immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute, said reversal is “welcome news,” but added, “the damage may already be done in making the United States a less attractive destination for talented international students.”
Material from Globe wire services was used in this report. Shelley Murphy of the Globe staff and correspondent Emily Spatz contributed to this report.
Danny McDonald can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @Danny__McDonald. Steven Porter can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @reporterporter. Omar Mohammed can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter (X) @shurufu.
