ACLU of Montana said students need ‘certainty’ while rights are ‘trampled’
By Keila Szpaller DAILY MONTANAN
A federal judge extended this week an emergency order that prevents the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from deporting two Montana State University graduate students.
Last month, four international students affiliated with the Montana University System had their visas revoked and student visitor records terminated.
The terminations could subject the students to immediate deportation, and two of the students, graduates at MSU, challenged the decision in federal court.
The ACLU of Montana sued on their behalf, and the Trump administration subsequently and separately reinstated them in a database that keeps those records, the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or SEVIS.
However, Alex Rate of the ACLU of Montana said in an email Thursday that the students still need the court to step in because the recent reinstatement does not provide the students ongoing assurance.
“Given the chaos and confusion that the Trump Administration has created for our clients, the only thing that can bring them some certainty is an order from the court,” Rate said in an email. “This Administration’s conduct is cruel and illegal, and we will not stand idly by while our clients’ rights are being trampled.”
NBC News reported Wednesday the revocations affected an estimated 3,000 international students in the U.S.
On April 21, Inside Higher Ed said the terminations had resulted in at least 28 lawsuits across the country.
At a hearing of Roe v. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Missoula, Judge Dana Christensen agreed the reinstatements did not mean the case was moot.
Christensen extended the temporary restraining order an additional 14 days until he had an opportunity to rule on the students’ motion for a preliminary injunction.
A media contact from the U.S. Attorney’s Office District of Montana declined to comment Thursday.
National media outlets said the terminations took place after Homeland Security ran the names of 1.3 million foreign students through a crime database and sent hits to the State Department.
The State Department then revoked visas and told Homeland Security to change their status from “active” to “terminated” in the SEVIS database, which university officials monitor.
The lawsuit said a terminated record requires a student to depart the U.S. immediately, citing a notification the students received from MSU.
However, the lawsuit alleged the visa revocation isn’t a legal justification for the termination of a SEVIS record. It said the students were not provided additional information about the terminations.
Therefore, the ACLU of Montana alleges the government’s actions circumvent the law and appear designed to coerce the students into “self-deporting.”
The lawsuit said the students had done nothing to violate their visa status, but the case challenges the terminations of their records in the SEVIS database, not the visa revocations.
The lawsuit also said the two plaintiffs from MSU had not been convicted of any crimes “in the U.S. or elsewhere” and both were “star students and model members of their respective school communities.”
In Judge Christensen’s emergency ruling, he found the case similar to one in New Hampshire in which the court found the federal government had not followed its own procedures in actions affecting students and violated due process protections.
At a hearing for a case in the Northern District of California in Oakland last week, an attorney for the Justice Department said the federal government would no longer terminate statuses based only on information in the crime database, according to NBC News.
