The US President Donald Trump’s administration rescinded its decision to revoke foreign student visas whose courses move online due to Coronavirus, a federal judge said on Tuesday.
A lawsuit was filed by the Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology against the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) latest rule that bars international students from staying in America unless they attend at least one in-person course.
The July 6 modifications also limited many students at normally operating schools from taking more than one class or three credit hours online in order to remain in the country.
“The government has agreed to rescind” the decision as well as any implementation of the directive, Judge Allison Burroughs said in a brief hearing.
Harvard and MIT earlier this month had asked the court to block the order announced by ICE that students must leave the country if their classes are only online, or transfer to a school offering in-person tuition.
The measure was seen as a move by President Donald Trump administration to put pressure on educational institutions that are adopting a cautious approach to reopening amid the global COVID-19 pandemic.
The universities say in their lawsuit that the order would harm students “immensely,” both personally and financially.
There were more than one million international students in the US for the 2018-19 academic year, according to the Institute of International Education (IIE).
Earlier, on Tuesday, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and more than a dozen top technology companies of US, also joined the lawsuit filed by the Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
These companies, along with the US Chamber of Commerce and other IT advocacy groups had asserted that the ICE directive will disrupt their recruiting plans, making it impossible to bring on board international students that businesses, including amici, had planned to hire, and disturb the recruiting process on which the firms have relied on to identify and train their future employees.
The US will “nonsensically be sending…these graduates away to work for our global competitors and compete against us…instead of capitalising on the investment in their education here in the US”, they had said adding that the July 6 directive will make it impossible for a large number of international students to participate in the CPT and OPT programmes.