Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healy says the new ICE policy is “egregious, irresponsible, and … [+] cruel.”
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This morning Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, joined by the attorneys general of 17 other states including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Boston against the Trump Administration. The suit challenges a policy announced last week by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, that would ban hundreds of thousands of foreign students from studying in the U.S. if their programs are offered online-only this fall because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The suit, which asks the court to block the rule with an immediate injunction, calls the new policy “cruel, abrupt and unlawful.”
Before the coronavirus pandemic struck, ICE did not grant F-1 visas to foreign students enrolled in online programs. But when the virus forced schools to close this March, ICE took no action to deport students who had to complete the term online. Last Monday, the Department of Homeland Security’s acting deputy secretary, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, defended the new rule on CNN. “If they’re not going to be a student or they’re going to be 100% online, then they don’t have a basis to be here,” he said. “They should go home, and then they can return when the school opens.”
The suit notes that the administration issued the rule after most colleges and universities had spent months before arriving at final plans for the fall that they believe are the best way for their institutions to keep students, faculty and staff safe from the virus. It says that institutions now face an “agonizing dilemma.” With just weeks before the term starts, they must find a way to offer sufficient numbers of in-person classes for their international students “without regard for the public health impact of doing so.”
If foreign students are unable to enroll as planned this fall, schools stand to lose “hundreds of millions of dollars” at a time when institutions of higher ed are already under huge financial strain, says the complaint. Beyond the financial impact to schools, the complaint says that international students contributed more than $14 billion to the nation’s economy in 2019.
The other states joining the suit are Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Virginia.
On July 8, two days after ICE issued the rule, Harvard and MIT were the first institutions to file a suit. Like the state of Massachusetts’ suit, that action is pending in federal district court in Boston. More than 50 schools, including Princeton and Penn, have filed an amicus brief in that suit as has The Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, on behalf of 180 institutions. A hearing in that case is scheduled for tomorrow.
Separately, the state of California filed a similar suit in federal court in northern California on Thursday. It also asks for an injunction to block enforcement of the rule.
All of the suits say that ICE violated the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946. which requires the government to give notice of intended rule changes, to allow the public to comment and to lay out a clear explanation of the need for the new rule. In mid-June, the U.S. Supreme Court based its rejection of the Trump Administration’s plan to end the DACA program on an Administrative Procedures Act claim.
