A Trump administration lawyer announced a sudden reversal Friday in a federal court in Washington, DC, saying that around 1,500 international students around the country would not have their visas revoked after all.

Joseph F. Carilli, a lawyer with the Trump Justice Department, told a judge that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was working on "new system" for reviewing and terminating the visas of international students, as the New York Times reports. Until that system is running, there will be no visa cancellations, at least for now, Carilli said.

Much like other actions by the Trump adminsitration, this follows weeks of chaos and panic among international students, many of them from China and India, who believed they were being forced to leave the country for no reason. Termination notices for their visas prompted a number of students to file lawsuits against the Trump administration, and a class action suit was filed in New Hampshire last Friday on behalf of international students in four states.

As the Chronicle reports, Assistant US Attorney Elizabeth Kurlan spoke at a hearing in US District Court in Oakland this morning, saying that visas for all plaintiffs in the Northern District of California "will remain active or shall be reactivated" while the new ICE policy and system are being developed.

At least 121 students in California had seen their visas revoked by the Trump administration in the last month, and around the country, some students self-deported for fear of detention. In the cases of some students, like one Columbia graduate student whose case was highlighted by the New York Times, the targeting by ICE appeared related to participation in a pro-Palestinian protest last year. Another Columbia student, Yunseo Chung, is a legal permanent resident of the US and has been here since age 7, and she is suing the Trump administration for having ICE hunt her down and try to arrest her.

The administration's sudden reversal today indicates that they did not believe they would succeed in court fights over these cases, and whatever system ICE is now developing to choose which students it should kick out of the country is something they hope will pass more legal muster.

Nevertheless it will be hard to overcome the obvious appearance of animus toward immigrants in general, and toward those who participated in protests against the war in Gaza.

Visa revocations had impacted over a dozen students at San Francisco State, Stanford, UC Berkeley, San Jose State, and UC Santa Cruz. An attorney for some of these students, Johnny Sinodis, told the Chronicle, "We’re getting emails from some of our plaintiffs as we speak," and he confirmed that the students had seen their visa records reactivated either late Thursday or early Friday, in the government's system.

The whole circus has echoes of the first months of Trump's first term in 2017, when his failed effort to block travel from multiple Muslim-majority nations sparked protests at airports, millions of dollars of donations to the ACLU, and fairly swift injunctions by federal judges. By May, Trump had basically given up and moved on, and the courts had spoken, which may or may not happen this time around.

Photo by Jeremy Huang