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Federal immigration officials targeted student visa holders by running their names through a federal database of criminal histories, according to court testimony given by Department of Homeland Security officials on Tuesday and reported by Politico.
As part of the Student Criminal Alien Initiative, as officials dubbed the effort, 20 ICE agents and several federal contractors ran the names of 1.3 million potential student visa holders through the database, searching for those that were both still enrolled in programs and had had some brush with the criminal justice system. Many of those students had only minor criminal infractions on their record like traffic violations, and they often had never been charged. ICE used that information to terminate students’ SEVIS records.
Officials testified that ICE ultimately flagged around 6,400 Student Exchange and Visitor Information System records for termination and used the data to revoke more than 3,000 student visas—far more than the 1,800 that Inside Higher Ed tracked over the past month.
The officials’ testimony came in a hearing for one of many lawsuits filed by international students and immigration attorneys challenging the sudden and unexplained visa terminations; dozens of the cases have been successful so far. Last week the agency restored international students’ visas amid the flurry of court losses and said it would release an updated policy in the near future.
On Monday, the Trump administration released a draft of that policy, which vastly expands the prior one and makes visa revocation legal grounds for a student’s legal residency to be terminated as well.
