CREDIT to Miami Herald By Clara-Sophia Daly

On Friday, the federal government reversed the abrupt terminations of foreign students’ visa registrations, ending weeks of confusion among international students and university administrators. The reversal came after more than 100 lawsuits were filed against Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem and Immigration and Customs Enforcement director Todd Lyons asking judges to grant students the ability to keep working and studying, the majority of which were successful. Immigration lawyers in many of the cases say the visa revocations appear to have been triggered by an automated system going through student records and terminating the status of any international student with any reported encounter with law enforcement. For two foreign students in Florida who took their cases to court, that is exactly what happened. Both had minor brushes with the law and lost their status, which triggered job loss. Then both students had to hire attorneys to get a temporary restraining order, only to have the Trump administration walk back its policy of visa revocations days later. One of those students is Anas Daou, a 31-year-old structural engineer from Lebanon, who was accepted into a doctoral civil engineering program at the University of Texas at Austin. After completing his Ph.D in 2024, he got a job at an engineering firm in Tampa, which sometimes contracts with the Department of Transportation. On March 29, Daou got an email from Homeland Security informing him that his student status had been revoked. For Daou, who is working at the engineering firm as part of his OPT — or the period where international student graduates can legally remain in the United States and work in their field — this meant he was unable to work. His attorney, Sam Badawi, said that in all of his years in the immigration field, he has never seen such arbitrary decisions made by the federal government. According to a criminal record search, Daou had a civil traffic violation from July of last year for “driving too fast for conditions,” which was dismissed.

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Like in many of the cases across the country, the judge granted the order, allowing Daou to return to work, and ensuring his visa would not be terminated and he would not be detained or deported without due process. The court found that the termination was “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with the law,” according to the court filing. Badawi argued losing his student status will cause Daou “irreparable harm,” not to mention the financial burden he faced, losing his job and having to contract an attorney. “What needs to happen, is you set the rules and we will play by the rules. Don’t change the rules mid-way,” said Badawi. In the same court on April 18 — Good Friday — the same judge, Mary Scriven, heard the case of Uzoma Ajugwe, a 26-year-old graduate student at the University of South Florida, who studies environmental engineering on a fully funded Graduate Research Assistantship. According to the court filing, Ajugwe, who is set to graduate this year, was advised on April 8 that his student status was terminated by ICE.

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According to the filing, he had an arrest on his record based on an unfounded misdemeanor allegation that he called his ex-girlfriend after they broke up and she asked him not to. That record was expunged this year. The termination of his student status meant the student and Ph.D candidate couldn’t work as a teaching assistant at USF, a salary he depended on. “He is terrified, he won’t go outside, he won’t go to class,” said his attorney Christopher Dempsey, who worked in the nation’s capital at the Office of Immigration Litigation in the U.S. Department of Justice for over a decade. Ajugwe used all of his savings to pay his attorney fees, just to have the federal government reverse course on student visa revocations seven days after the lawsuit was filed, and just two days after the government complied with the lawsuit. Dempsey says that most of the students do not have the ability to pay for lawyers, and are left in the dark trying to navigate the complicated bureaucracy and understand what this all means. “It is expensive for students to hire lawyers, and an incredible burden. There are a lot of students who cannot afford it,” said Dempsey. The Justice Department, in its Friday reversal on student visas, said that immigration officials are already working on a new system for reviewing and terminating visas for international students, the New York Times reported.

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And for now students whose visas were canceled have a momentary reprieve. But for Dempsey and Badawi’s clients, and many other foreign students across the country, the financial and emotional damage is done. This story was originally published April 25, 2025 at 7:47 PM.

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