It’s been four days since the Trump administration restored the legal statuses of around 1,500 international students, but the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia is still publicly defending two students in the state that were going to be affected.
The government had terminated the records on the student and exchange visitor information center — a database that is used to see if international students were abiding by the conditions of their stay. The Trump administration reversed course late last week and restored the legal status for these students.
“It’s been really unclear what the government was even intending to do in this,” Aubrey Sparks, director of ACLU-West Virginia said Monday on MetroNews “Talkline. “Without being updated in that database, it’s impossible for schools to tell whether someone has legal status to be here.”
Sajawal Ali Sohail and Shival Vyas are two students whose information was terminated just weeks before their respective graduations, which prompted them to seek legal help. Sohail, a WVU student, was sent an email that he needed to leave the country after he had been identified in a criminal records check. Sohail’s attorneys say he was wrongly arrested and later cleared of a fraud scheme in which his family members were actually the victims.
As for Vyas, he notified he too would need to leave the country because of his identification in a criminal records check. Vyas was arrested back in 2020 in Indiana on a misdemeanor charge for driving under the influence. He was sentenced to probation, but that was lifted soon after.
Sparks says the government did not go about this in a constitutional manner.
“They didn’t look at these students individually. They didn’t make sure that what they were doing was factually correct. They just said we’re going to purge the system and if we violate the law in the process, so be it,” Sparks said Monday on MetroNews’ “Talkline.”
“I don’t even think that it’s necessarily my opinion — it’s just the law,” Sparks said. “They had the ability to revoke people’s legal status for an enumerated list of reasons, and they went beyond that, and they tried to push people out of the country for reasons that were not legally justified.”
According to the law, the federal government can revoke a college student’s legal status for a crime of violence they committed that carried a penalty of over a year.
Sparks says the government has the legal authority to seek out those convicted of those specific crimes and give them a notice to leave the country, but they took the opportunity, in this case, to overstep the boundary.
“If the government wanted to identify those people who had been charged or convicted of crimes like that, then they would have the legal right to do so,” Sparks said. “Our issue here, largely, is not just that they cast this wide net, but that this wide net was illegal and caught a lot of people in it that didn’t meet that obligation.”
Sparks says the way this situation has unfolded will not help citizens feel confident in the government or the legal system.