On Friday, the federal government turned the sharp termination of visas registrations for foreign students, ending the weeks of confusion among international students and university administrators.
The conversion came after more than 100 court cases were filed against the Minister of Homeland Security, Christie November and the director of immigration and customs law enforcement Todd Lyon, asking the judges to provide students with the opportunity to continue to work and study, the greater part of which were successful. In many cases, immigration attorneys say that the visa withdrawal seems to have been challenged by an automated system passing through students’ documents and termination of the status of each international student with each meeting with the law enforcement agencies.
For two foreign students in Florida, who brought their cases to court, this is exactly what happened. Both had minor brushes with the law and lost their status, which caused job loss. Then both students had to hire lawyers to obtain a temporary restraining order, just for the Trump administration to return their policy to cancel visas days later.
One of these students is Anas Dau, a 31-year-old structural engineer from Lebanon, who was admitted to a doctoral program for construction at the University of Texas in Austin. After graduating from his doctorate in 2024, he received a job at an engineering company in Tampa, which sometimes concludes a contract with the Ministry of Transport.
On March 29, Dow received an email from internal security, informing him that his student’s status had been canceled.
For Dau, who works in the engineering company as part of his choice – or the period in which international students can remain legitimately in the United States and work in their field – this meant that he was unable to work.
His lawyer himself Badav said that he had never seen such arbitrary decisions taken by the federal government in all his years in the immigration area.
According to a criminal record, Dau had a violation of civil trafficking since July last year for “driving too quickly for conditions”, which was rejected.
As in many cases throughout the country, the judge provided the order, allowing Daou to return to work and ensure that his visa would not be terminated and he would not be detained or deported without a proper process.
The court found that the termination was “arbitrary, capricious, abuse of discretion or otherwise not in line with the law”, according to the court’s announcement.
Badavi claims that the loss of student status will cause “irreparable Dow damage”, not to mention the financial burden with which he was confronted, lose his job and have to conclude a lawyer contract.
“What needs to happen, do you define the rules and we will play by the rules. Do not change the rules in the middle of the road,” Badav said.
In the same court on April 18, Friday, the same judge, Mary Presiden, heard the case with the Ozoma Ajugve, a 26-year-old graduate student at the University of South Florida, who studied the environmental engineering of a fully funded assistant for a scientific researcher.
According to a court filing, Ajugwe, which will be completed this year, was advised on April 8 that his student’s status was terminated by ICE.
According to the submission, he had an arrest on his record on the basis of an unjustified accusation of a violation that he had called his ex -girlfriend after they separated and she asked him not to do it. This record was extinguished this year.
The termination of the student’s status meant that the student and the doctoral student could not work as a teaching assistant at the USF, the salary on which it depends.
“He is horrible, he will not go out, he will not go to class,” said his lawyer Christopher Dempsey, who works in the capital of the nation at the Immigration Law Dispute Service at the US Department of Justice for more than a decade.
Ajugwe uses all its savings to pay its lawyer’s fees just for the federal government to turn to a visa -annulment course seven days after the case is brought and just two days after the government has complied with the case.
Demsey says most students do not have the ability to pay for lawyers and are left in the dark, trying to navigate the complex bureaucracy and understand what all this means.
“It is expensive for students to hire lawyers and incredible weight. There are many students who cannot afford it,” Dempsey said.
The Ministry of Justice, on Friday, on Student Visas, said that immigration officers are already working on a new system for reviewing and terminating visas for international students, the New York Times reported.
And for now, students whose visas have been canceled have a momentary recovery. But for the customers of DEMPSY and Badawi and many other foreign students across the country, financial and emotional damage is done.