#Harvard, MIT sue Trump administration over policy for foreign students

Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have filed suit to block a new Trump administration policy that would force foreign students taking online-only courses this fall to return home, according to a report.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a directive Monday for F-1 visa-holding students to return to their home countries if they are enrolled in an online-only course load, CNN reported.

In March, ICE made an exception to an existing rule that students with these visas must attend classes in-person and said the allowance would be in effect throughout the pandemic.

Now, “ICE’s action leaves hundreds of thousands of international students with no


educational options within the United States,” the Massachusetts Federal lawsuit from Wednesday alleges. “Just weeks from the start of the fall semester, these students are largely unable to transfer to universities providing on-campus instruction, notwithstanding ICE’s suggestion that they might do so to avoid removal from the country.”

And for those students who do return home taking online course will be, “impossible, impracticable, prohibitively expensive, and/or dangerous,” the court papers say.

The move comes after the two prestigious universities said they carefully planned for months to offer most of their classes online “in reliance on ICE’s recognition that the COVID-19 pandemic compelled allowing international students to remain in the country even if their studies had been moved entirely online,” the court documents say.

The schools say the order appears to be an “effort by the federal government to force universities to reopen in-person classes … notwithstanding the universities’ judgment that it is neither safe nor educationally advisable to do so,” the court documents say.

“The effect—and perhaps even the goal—is to create as much chaos for universities and international students as possible,” the suit charges.

“The order came down without notice—its cruelty surpassed only by its recklessness. It appears that it was designed purposefully to place pressure on colleges and universities to open their on-campus classrooms for in-person instruction this fall, without regard to concerns for the health and safety of students, instructors, and others,” Harvard University President Larry Bacow said, according to the outlet.

The universities are asking a judge to intervene and set aside the new rule saying that it violates the Administrative Procedures Act.

Big Apple schools are also scrambling amid Monday’s decision, according to one New York University Professor who told The Post that students and staff alike are panicking because the school has such a high percentage of foreign students.

The students, “have leases on apartments, some of them are afraid if they go back to China they won’t be allowed back in so they feel stuck financially and they don’t know what is going to happen,” the professor said noting there is additional uncertainty about what to do since everyone is wondering whether the lawsuits to block the decision will succeed.

And because many of NYU’s students are from Asia, when classes are beginning each day at 9 a.m. in New York it would be 10 p.m. in Japan or Korea for example, the teacher said.

“People would be taking [online] classes at two o’clock, three o’clock, four o’clock in the morning because of the time change,” the professor explained.

The professor and other staff “are afraid we will have no students and no jobs because such a high percentage of our students are foreign born,” the teacher said.

ICE — which is named as a defendant along with the Department of Homeland Security — declined to comment.