The Trump administration has quietly granted at least 85 international students across the country certain immigration protections in recent months, resolving lawsuits filed in April after the administration abruptly terminated thousands of students’ legal records, a Concord Monitor review of court records found.
The agreements, which have not been previously reported, limit when the federal government can re-terminate the students’ records in a federal database called the Student Exchange Visitor Information, or SEVIS. Those who lose active status in SEVIS face disruptions in their education and risk deportation.
The legal agreements – reached between May and this week in at least 14 different cases spanning six states – resolve only a fraction of the roughly 65 lawsuits filed in April. Many of the cases that were resolved included multiple students.
The other cases either remain ongoing or were dismissed through other legal processes, court records show.
The stipulations follow the government’s announcement in late April that it would temporarily restore the terminated students’ records as it developed a more orderly process for reviewing them.
More than three months after that announcement, the federal government has not publicly rolled out a new system or instituted a new wave of SEVIS record terminations. The stipulations could serve as an indication that the Trump administration has decided to alter its approach toward international students studying at U.S. universities.
A Department of Justice spokesperson declined to comment for this story. The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Among those who have reached agreements in recent months is Xiaotian Liu, a Dartmouth Ph.D. student whose lawsuit prompted statewide news coverage in April.
Gilles Bissonnette, one of Liu’s attorneys and the legal director of the ACLU of New Hampshire, said in an interview this week that he began hearing about settlements in similar cases across the country in May or June. Bissonnette and the rest of Liu’s legal team engaged with government lawyers for a couple of months before finalizing an agreement last week, he said.
“It was a settlement that addressed many of his concerns and reinstated his SEVIS record,” Bissonnette said.” He thought it was a result that made him reasonably whole, so he could go about his life and go about his studies at Dartmouth.”
The protections Liu won appear slightly broader than those afforded to the other students, whose agreements all include roughly the same language.
In Liu’s case, the government agreed not to terminate his SEVIS record of F-1 status “absent new information.” In the other cases, the government agreed only that it would not re-terminate the students’ SEVIS records “based solely on the National Crime and Information Center (‘NCIC’) record that led to the initial termination.”
The reference to the Crime and Information Center appears to allude to the fact that some of the students whose records were terminated originally may have been flagged due to a minor legal infraction, such as traffic violations or other interactions with law enforcement that did not lead to criminal convictions.
Though the government agreed in April to temporarily reactivate the students’ records later that month, that policy change did not provide any legal protections going forward.
Bissonnette said the agreement brokered last week carried a lot of significance.
“Had the government just changed its policy and then did nothing else – didn’t reach a stipulated agreement with us – I think we probably would be continuing to litigate this case,” he said.
The agreement, Bissonnette said, “was really important to Mr. Liu, because I think one of the things that he and many others were fearful of is that he could have the rug pulled out from underneath him in the future without there having been any material changes. With that language, he felt that there was sufficient protection.”
Liu, who is from China, began doctoral studies in computer science at Dartmouth in 2023. He previously obtained bachelors and masters degrees at Wake Forest University.
The SEVIS system was created in the wake of 9-11 to better track international students and other visitors. A student must maintain an active status in the system in order to work and study and risks being detained and removed from the country if their status is terminated.
Many students, including Liu, only learned that their status had been terminated or flagged when their university contacted them after conducting an internal review.
In addition to in New Hampshire, the government reached agreements with students in Arizona, California, Massachusetts, Michigan and New Jersey. The students attended a range of public and private institutions, including Tufts University, the University of Southern California, and schools within the University of California system.