After thousands of international students abruptly lost their legal statuses in the past few months, the Department of Homeland Security offered some insight Tuesday into how some of the terminations were decided.
At a court hearing in Washington about the recent targeting of many international students across the country, the department said it used 10 to 20 employees to run the names of 1.3 million foreign-born students through the National Crime Information Center, an FBI-run computerized index that includes criminal history information.
The process populated the 6,400 “hits.” And from there, many students experienced terminations of their records in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), which maintains information about nonimmigrant students and exchange visitors.
In the hearing, the federal government detailed its initiative to screen foreign students entitled the “Student Criminal Alien Initiative.” Andre Watson, assistant director of DHS said that the employees served in “various roles as analysts” and that the entire process, overseen by DHS acting Executive Director Robert Hammer, took two to three weeks.
Names were sent to the State Department, Watson said, and roughly 3,000 students had their visas revoked. The State Department then instructed DHS to terminate the students’ SEVIS records.
Elizabeth D. Kurlan, an attorney for the Justice Department, said last week during a hearing in the Northern District of California in Oakland that going forward, ICE will not be terminating statuses based solely on findings in the crime information center.
While Watson said that DHS had conducted similar searches in the past for specific students during his four years there, the agency had not done so to this magnitude.
The Trump administration began revoking the visas of thousands of international students in addition to their records and legal statuses in March. Critics said that the terminations appeared to take aim at those who’ve participated in political activism or have criminal charges against them, like DUIs. But for weeks, questions remained over the criteria the government used to terminate visas and statuses, with little to no notice to students.
For immigration attorneys and policy experts, the revelation has been concerning.
“Using tech to achieve immigration enforcement goals seems like a bad science fiction movie, but it’s the situation we are living in now,” Jath Shao, a Cleveland-based immigration attorney who represents several students dealing with these terminations. “It should concern all Americans, because these tools used against subsets of immigrants could be turned against any group.”
Shao said that while the new developments aren’t surprising, they do invite questions over the process’ thoroughness. A group of 10 employees, Shao said, is not enough to check the massive quantity of international students’ records. And solely going through names creates the potential for major mistakes, he said.
“There can be so many variations of your name depending on various IDs and things like that,” Shao said. “There’s a risk of false positives, especially if your name is Mohammed or Juan — something very common — it’s going to be high.”
Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an attorney and policy analyst with the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, also said that the National Crime Information Center may not have the most up-to-date information.
The index relies on cities, counties, states and other sources to voluntarily report their data. And sometimes the database doesn’t have the final dispositions of cases, Bush-Joseph said. So actually scanning someone’s background for a criminal record often takes extra digging.
Many immigration attorneys, including Shao, have worked with students who had charges dismissed or won their cases in the past and were never convicted. Suguru Onda, a doctoral student at Brigham Young University in Utah, for example, had a 2019 fishing-related citation on his record that was eventually dismissed.
His legal status was terminated a few weeks ago because he was “identified in criminal records check and/or has had their VISA revoked,” government officials told him in a notice. Onda’s status has since been restored.
“Technology made this happen. Technology facilitated this fast process. But at the same time, it shows the limitations of the technology,” Bush-Joseph said.
Shao said that the use of government databases for immigration purposes is already stoking fear among even U.S. citizens, who worry that their information could be weaponized against them.
“People are very afraid to sign their names for anything now, even on the sponsor side,” Shao said. “It’s scary, not just for students.”
