More than 20 ICE officials and contractors cross-referenced 1.3 million names of foreign students through a federal database that tracks encounters with law enforcement.
A botched effort by the Trump administration to raise red flags about thousands of foreign students studying in the United States began with a rushed project by immigration officials dubbed the “Student Criminal Alien Initiative,” according to new details revealed in court Tuesday.
Beginning in March, as many as 20 Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, aided by contractors, ran 1.3 million names of foreign students through a federal database that tracks criminal histories, missing persons and other brushes with the law. The search found about 6,400 “hits” that officials concluded were solid matches for names and other biographical details in the students’ records, Homeland Security officials said during a hearing.
But many of those hits flagged students who had minor interactions with police — arrests for reckless driving, DUIs and misdemeanors, with charges often dropped or never brought at all — far short of the legal standard required to revoke a student’s legal ability to study in the U.S. Nevertheless, ICE officials used that data to “terminate” the students’ records in an online database schools and ICE use to track student visa holders in the U.S. Those terminations led schools to bar students from attending classes — some just weeks from graduation — and warn that they could be at risk of immediate deportation.
The action spawned more than 100 lawsuits, resulting in dozens of restraining orders issued by judges across the country, who called the effort unlawful. On Friday, with more legal pain looming, the administration reversed the terminations and said it was drafting a new policy to vet foreign students in the U.S.
But Tuesday’s hearing revealed the hurried nature of the overall effort. Hundreds of the terminations, an ICE official who helped oversee the effort said, came less than 24 hours after an April 1 email exchange between his office and the State Department, with little sign of review of individual cases to ensure the decisions were accurate. In addition, the State Department relied on the data to revoke the visas of 3,000 people.
“When the courts say due process is important, we’re not unhinged, we’re not radicals,” U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes said during an hourlong hearing. “I’m not on a lark questioning why students who have been here legally, who paid to be in this country by paying their universities … they’re cut off with less than 24 hours of consideration and no notice whatsoever.”
The origin of the initiative
ICE and Justice Department officials described the ill-fated, resource-intensive effort under pressure by Reyes. The Biden-appointed judge used Tuesday’s hearing to elicit as many specifics as possible about the administration’s effort to target foreign students admitted to the country on so-called F-1 visas. Once admitted, those students are tracked in an ICE database known as the Student Exchange and Visitor Information System, or SEVIS. Andre Watson, an official with ICE’s Counter Threat Lead Development Unit, said the purpose of terminating the student SEVIS registrations was not necessarily to prompt the foreign nationals to leave the U.S., but as a “red flag” to trigger further scrutiny by government agencies or universities. But Reyes noted that no part of the program involved giving the affected students notice so they could explain their situations and avoid unnecessary consequences. The schools involved appear to have been given cursory reasons for the terminations, such as vague references to a criminal records check or students being “out of status.”
And internal records revealed in court underscored the hasty nature of the process. After the State Department proposed revoking 3,000 visas, ICE weighed whether to focus its SEVIS terminations on those same 3,000 people.
“Please terminate all,” responded an official identified in court papers as a “division chief” in DHS’ Homeland Security Investigations. After more than a week of vague responses in court from government lawyers about the immigration status of those students whose records were terminated, Justice Department attorney Johnny Walker said being booted from SEVIS did not mean that students had to leave the U.S. immediately. But he acknowledged that some universities might require those students to stop going to classes.
“That’s up to the school,” Walker said.
Lawyers for the students have noted that failure to attend classes can put someone out of legal immigration status and be grounds for deportation.
Another due process rebuke
Reyes at one point derided the effort as “the non-process process.” She said the Trump administration had other options than simply terminating the students in the system and waiting to see what happens.
“You could have sent a letter to all these universities and said, ‘Those people have come up on a hit, you may want to check them out,’” the judge said. Even after the hearing, it remained unclear how deeply DHS officials examined the reasons students had “hits” in the federal criminal justice database run by the National Crime Information Center, or NCIC. The University of Wisconsin student who brought the suit that led to Tuesday’s hearing, Akshar Patel, had faced a reckless driving charge but it was ultimately dismissed.
“Each record was scrutinized based on the criminal history,” Watson said. “If we deported every single individual in this country who’s been tagged for speeding there’d be very few people left,” Reyes said. “You and I both know Mr. Patel is not a criminal, right? And anyone looking at the record would know that he’s not a criminal.”
Reyes said it was stunning that federal employees were diverted for weeks onto the labor-intensive project, just as the Trump administration was seeking to fire huge swaths of the federal workforce.
“It still boggles my mind that we’re firing tens of thousands of federal workers on no notice and then take 10 or 20 of them to run a bunch of names through a database to see if they’re still students, if they have a speeding record,” the judge said. “You know, not my call.”
A State Department spokesperson did not provide any information on changes to their vetting practices or statistics about visa revocations, but said they “happen on an ongoing basis.”
The State Department “will continue to work closely with the Department of Homeland Security to enforce zero tolerance for aliens in the United States who violate U.S. laws, threaten public safety, or in other situations where warranted,” the spokesperson said.
A spokesperson for DHS did not respond to a request for comment.
