(C) El Paso Matters.org
This story was originally published by El Paso Matters.org and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Affected UTEP international students have visas restored, one student still concerned [1]
['Daniel Perez', 'More Daniel Perez', 'El Paso Matters', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar', 'Where Img', 'Height Auto Max-Width']
Date: 2025-04-28
Last week’s news that the Trump administration would restore access to international students who had not had their visas revoked was little comfort to a University of Texas at El Paso graduate student with an F-1 visa and mounting concerns.
The student, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, said his visa had not been terminated, but the uncertainty of the situation has worn him down as he completes his studies. The man said he is frightened.
The UTEP student, who lives with his spouse, said he understands that he has the right to travel abroad, but is concerned with the risks. Even a recent trip to New Mexico made him uneasy. He no longer considers crossing the border into Mexico as an option.
“Right now I’m feeling as if we are the enemies,” the student said during a telephone interview. He hails from a South American country. “(Americans) think they are better off without us so it’s better for us to go.”
The student said he initially planned to extend his stay for one year after graduation to work, and possibly seek permanent residency. Where he initially felt the country’s embrace, today he feels unwelcome and unwanted.
“Things have changed a lot since January,” he said, adding that he would advise his countrymen to consider other countries for higher education. “That’s life.”
PREVIOUSLY Crackdown on student visas reaches El Paso region. What comes next? It is unclear if the students with terminated visas can still be enrolled and what recourse they would have as finals week starts May 12 for UTEP and EPCC.
A database from The Chronicle of Higher Education showed that as of April 24, UTEP had 11 instances of canceled visas, and New Mexico State University in nearby Las Cruces had nine.
UTEP and NMSU spokespeople said today that all of its students’ visas reported canceled through the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or SEVIS, have been restored. A spokeswoman for El Paso Community College, which reported two revoked visas two weeks ago, said that the visas were reinstated. A Texas Tech Health El Paso representative said that none of its students have been affected.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security stated April 25 that it would restore the visas on the SEVIS database and pause additional deactivations for now. The change was made after weeks of deep analysis and legal challenges to include dozens of restraining orders from concerned judges who found faults with the execution of mass terminations of student visas.
The number of revoked student visas vary from a high of more than 4,700 by the American Immigration Lawyers Association, to a more conservative 1,400 estimate by the National Association of Foreign Student Advisers last week.
AILA leadership was grateful with the government’s decision. Association members were involved in dozens of lawsuits filed nationwide. It claimed that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s revocation of student visas without proper vetting was an overstep.
AILA President Keilli Stump said that the decision allowed students and universities across the country and the world to take a collective sigh of relief.
“It’s a sad reality that this administration’s chaotic policies are the new normal,” Stump said in a prepared statement. “As we move forward, it is crucial to continue to address and rectify these harms and other similar threats to ensure that such overreach does not happen again.”
In an April 25 story in the Washington Post, a DHS spokeswoman said the revocations were still in place, but the department did restore SEVIS access for people who did not have their visas terminated.
A Justice Department attorney said during the hearing in a Washington, D.C., federal court Friday that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency was developing a policy to provide a framework for SEVIS record terminations.
“Until such a policy is issued, the SEVIS records for plaintiff(s) in this case (and other similarly situated plaintiffs) will remain active or shall be reactivated if not currently active and ICE will not modify the record solely based on the (National Crime Information Center) finding that resulted in the recent SEVIS record termination,” the attorney said.
The revocation of international student visas created confusion about deportation or self-deportation, how to appeal the decision, whether the students were still enrolled in classes, and whether they should return home during summer break.
A terminated SEVIS record means that an international student loses all on- and off-campus employment authorization, and that they cannot re-enter the United States.
Some colleges and universities have reported that some of their students had lost their F-1 or J-1 visas because of their activism and participation in protests against the war in Gaza, according to Inside Higher Ed.
Most international college students have the F-1 visa, which allows people to enter the country as full-time students at accredited colleges to pursue a degree, diploma or certificate. M-1 visas are for students who attend vocational or nonacademic institutions. The J-1 is for people traveling in the United States as part of an exchange program.
There were more than 1.1 million international students studying in the United States during the 2023-24 academic year, according to Open Doors, a comprehensive online resource about international students. Of those students, almost 90,000 attended Texas colleges and universities.
UTEP enrolled 1,337 international students, including 520 from countries other than Mexico, or about 5.5% of the student population in fall 2023, according to UTEP’s Center for Institutional Evaluation, Research and Planning.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://elpasomatters.org/2025/04/28/el-paso-utep-epcc-nmsu-student-visas-trump-ice/
Published and (C) by El Paso Matters.org
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 International.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/elpasomatters/
