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A federal judge on Thursday blocked the Trump administration on nationwide from terminating the legal status that allows foreign students to study at colleges and universities in the US. The preliminary injunction issued by US District Judge Jeffrey White of the federal district court in San Francisco is the latest major blow to the efforts by the administration to target international students as it seeks to carry out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. The case concerns a sweeping maneuver by the administration to tamper with student records – known as SEVIS records – of immigrants who are in the US on education visas, putting them in jeopardy of deportation. Though the administration had backed down on that initiative last month amid numerous legal challenges, White said in his ruling that he “does not find it speculative to conclude that, in the absence of an injunction (the administration) would abruptly re-terminate SEVIS records without notice.” The SEVIS database, which is operated by the Department of Homeland Security, tracks the immigration status of international students and is used by universities to maintain information about the students’ enrollment. In April, the administration began cancelling the records of thousands of international students. The administration’s actions, White wrote, “uniformly wreaked havoc not only on the lives of Plaintiffs here but on similarly situated F-1 nonimmigrants across the United States and continues do so.” The ruling from White, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, came in a series of cases brought by international students whose SEVIS records were changed in a way that they said made their presence in the US illegal. White said the students were likely to prevail on their claim that such actions violated federal rule-making procedures because they were “arbitrary and capricious.” “Defendants do not suggest that these individuals pose an immediate safety threat or that they pose a threat to national security,” he wrote. “In contrast, Plaintiffs have shown that Defendants likely exceeded their authority and acted arbitrarily and capriciously in those enforcement efforts, and the ‘public interest is served by compliance with the (Administrative Procedure Act).’” CNN’s Tierney Sneed contributed to this report.
