ICE is now threatening to deport any international student who will have only online classes next semester. The news came on July 6, as the coronavirus numbers in the states continued to soar. Many international students who hold  F-1 and M-1 visas will not be able to return to their campuses. The measure would entail high costs for these students who already contribute nearly $41 billion to the U.S. economy. 

“I think it’s cruel. I can’t even see a benefit to it. We contribute a lot to the economy. I worked really hard to be here, and to have that taken away overnight is absolutely cruel,” said Julia Sipowicz, an international student studying film at NYU Tisch. 

Since the onset of the pandemic students have realized how frail their status is in the country. At NYU, the largest private university in the country, with 19,600 international students, the pandemic has led to one crisis after another. They faced eviction from their dormitories in March because of the COVID-19 outbreak. Now, they may face eviction from the country. 

NYU President Andy Hamilton assured students in an email that “ NYU’s leadership has been looking ahead and working on plans for a return to in-person, on-campus activity to be accompanied by an effective set of health and safety protocols.” 

Sipowicz is still uneasy despite Hamilton’s email. Her academic advisor assured her she was fine, because her program is hybrid. But she doesn’t trust the system.

 “I was one of the students who got kicked out of the dorms,” she said. “I’m very weary of what could happen in the future given how (NYU) didn’t think of the consequences. I need to look out for myself and not expect them to,” she said. 

Students who are enrolled in classes that are confirmed to be in person or hybrid are not entirely safe. If there is a resurgence later in the year, and their programs switch to online courses, they could be required to leave the U.S.

Zhuoru Deng, a second-year graduate international student at NYU Steinhardt, doesn’t know if she should transfer to the Shanghai campus. 

“There are risky choices on both sides. What if I stay in the U.S. and the course goes online in October/November,” she asked. “My advisor told me, ‘If you go back to China, you have to be prepared for the possibility of not being able to come back to the U.S.’”

Getting a ticket to Shanghai will not be easy. Flights are limited and costs can be as high as $10,000. Also, tickets need to be booked through an agent. Regular booking will not be available until November. 

“Some agents are frauds, and some of my friends have already lost money booking through them,” Deng said. 

Harvard and the Michigan Institute of Technology have sued the Trump administration in response to ICE’s announcement. Sipocwicz wishes NYU would do more, like reaching out directly to the government or immigration lawyers to find out how to help students. On July 7 Hamilton announced that NYU intends to file an amicus brief in support of the lawsuit.

But Sipocwicz wants the university to do more.

“NYU should do more to advocate for us,” she said. “I haven’t seen NYU do that. A statement from the president doesn’t make a difference.”

The post ICE takes aim at international students appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

 The agency that oversees the nation’s student and exchange visitor program, announced that international students must take at least one in-person class in the fall to maintain their visa status, or they will have to leave the U.S. 

 In a hotel room in Shenyang, a city 2,800 miles away from her hometown Shenzhen, Fang, a student of New York University, said she was being thrown a curveball again. After NYU announced in June their plan to operate in a hybrid model in the fall, with an in-person and Zoom option, she decided to go back to China and attend classes remotely. But the new rule now requires her to show up in the  classroom so she won’t lose her student visa. 

“I have no idea what I should do in the next step,” Fang said. “ I have to make a new plan to complete my degree.”  

Chinese students like Fang, may become the biggest casualties of the latest ICE regulation on international students. For the tenth consecutive year, China remained the largest source of international students in the US, making up 33.7% of all foreign students in 2019, according to a report by the Institute of International Education. These students, whether they have returned home or stayed in the U.S., are scrambling to maintain their visa status which has faced more scrutiny under the Trump administration since the pandemic began.  

Former Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have both voiced their opposition to the policy on Twitter. Elizabeth Warren urged the ICE and the Department of Homeland Security to “drop this policy immediately” and called the move “senseless, cruel and xenophobic.” 

Kicking international students out of the US during a global pandemic because their colleges are moving classes online for physical distancing hurts students. It’s senseless, cruel, and xenophobic. @ICEgov and @DHSgov must drop this policy immediately. https://t.co/MHYduGA1Pk

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) July 7, 2020

 Sanders also used the word “cruelty” to describe the disturbing policy. “Foreign students are being threatened with a choice: risk your life going to class in-person or get deported,” he said.  

The cruelty of this White House knows no bounds. Foreign students are being threatened with a choice: risk your life going to class in-person or get deported.

We must stand up to Trump’s bigotry. We must keep all our students safe. https://t.co/Q2MvmgJPqV

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) July 6, 2020

If a university adopts the hybrid model, foreign students have to take “the minimum number of online classes required to make normal progress in their degree program,” and have to be back in the states to participate in the in-person classes. 

 For many schools that offered the in-person option for smaller scale seminar classes, like NYU and Columbia University, classroom presence is optional. Local students can opt to stay at home and participate via Zoom. Yet international students, per this policy, will not have the same privilege. 

 “Is it worth risking my health to travel back and attend the classes?” Fang asked. 

 After many states reopened, the confirmed cases across the U.S  soared. On July 2, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 54,357 new cases, a record single day jump.

University campuses are particularly vulnerable to such a highly contagious disease. Washington University reported that at least 112 fraternity residents have tested positive for Covid-19 on June 30.

Even if they are willing to risk their health to attend in-person classes, the students that are already home face travel restrictions. On January 31, President Trump banned foreigners that had stayed in China in the past 14 days to enter the U.S. Five months  later with Covid-19 decreasing in most regions of China, the travel restriction is still active. 

 This travel ban is essentially in conflict with the ICE regulation that mandates international students to return to the U.S. to attend in person classes. 

 Another NYU graduate student from China, Taylor Xu, who studies biostatistics, chose to stay because her “visa is going to expire.”

Given the indefinite suspension of U.S. consulates in China and the sensitive nature of her major, she said “it wouldn’t be easy to get a new visa.” 

 On May 29, President Trump signed an executive order to ban certain groups of Chinese graduate students from entering the country, accusing them of “acquir[ing] sensitive United States technologies and intellectual property, in part to bolster the modernization and capability of its military, the People’s Liberation Army.”

 Now, Xu faced the chance of being deported as her program will operate remotely.

“It’s mentally stressful and disheartening that the country I’ve lived in for six years may kick me out,” Xu said. “The fact that I can’t find a reasonably priced ticket home also makes the situation more challenging.”

 To stop coronavirus cases from entering China, Beijing has drastically cut the number of international flights to “one route to any specific country with no more than one flight per week” since March. Although it eased airline access after President Trump threatened to ban inbound flights from China, allowing Delta Air Lines and United Airlines to operate four weekly flights in total, the seats available still fell short of demand. 

While international students are rattled, universities across the country have been advocating strongly against the policy. Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology sued the Trump administration.  In an email to the students, Lee Bollinger, President of Columbia University, which has the fourth-largest international student population in the U.S., wrote “the destructive and indefensible purpose driving these policies is by now all too familiar.” 

 Universities are also in the process of transitioning to hybrid models to save international students’ visas. But the growing number of new cases  and the chance of a second wave hitting in the fall could easily force universities to close again. 

 “If a second wave hits this fall and my school moves to online classes again, what would  I do?” Fang asked.  

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Students can transfer to another institution or must leave the country. 

Many of the universities going online only are in California where the coronavirus  cases continue to grow.

On July 8, Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to stop the policy. 

More than 50 universities are filing either amicus briefs or lawsuits opposing the new ICE regulation, according to Ubadah Sabbagh, who voluntarily crowdsourced and fact-checked university announcements over his twitter account. His twitter thread amassed over 5,000 comments and retweets with university internal letters or official announcements.

Universities filing amicus briefs/lawsuits against new ICE regs by my count:

– Cornell
– Dartmouth
– Georgetown
– Harvard
– Hopkins (forthcoming)
– Michigan State
– MIT
– Northeastern
– Northwestern
– Penn
– Princeton
– Purdue
– Stanford
– U of California
– UMich
– USC
– Yale

— Ubadah Sabbagh (@neubadah) July 9, 2020

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, more than half of the universities are planning for in-person teaching for next semester. Around one fourth of the universities are proposing a hybrid model and about  9% of  are planning for a fully online model.

Data provided by the Department of Commerce shows that international students make up 5.5 percent of the total U.S. higher education population, contributing $44.7 billion to the U.S. economy in 2018. China is the largest source of international students in the U.S., followed by India, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Canada.

 Incoming international students are also having difficulty  gaining access to  F-1 visas because of  U.S. embassy shutdowns.

Ke Li, an incoming NYU journalism graduate student said she decided to defer her offer till next year.

 “I have to take online courses from China if I accept the offer,” she said.“Students like me who are not in the states only get the choice of being fully online.” 

 Li did not feel the government’s response to contain and mitigate the public health crisis was adequate.

“It is safer to wait another year to see what is coming,” she said.

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Katherine Franke is a Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Columbia University. She’s considered to be one of the “nation’s leading scholars writing on law, religion, and rights” and has written books on topics such as abolition and reparations. Now, Franke is joining a different distinguished group of Americans, she and her partner have decided to sponsor an asylum seeker, a young trans woman from El Salvador. They will take her in and be responsible for her until she is given permission to permanently reside in the country.

The woman, Ana, not her real name,  was being held in Tijuana when Franke met her. She was with a group of Columbia students volunteering with Al Otro Lado, an organization the provides legal assistance to migrants on both sides of the border when she met Ana and heard her story.  Ana told Franke about severe abuse she fled in El Salvador and then endured in Tijuana when she was sent there by the U.S. government. She says she was beaten and terrorized by drug cartels and the Mexican Federal Police.

“She had been into the clinic a couple of times, one of the other lawyers there had done an intake with her and had just been completely flattened by the story,” Franke explained. “We sort of took her under our wing when we were there, and get her ready as possible before she was put into detention.”

Sponsoring asylum seekers is not an answer to the number of people who are trying to enter the country, but it has been a method of welcoming refugees from into the U.S. from other parts of the world in times of crisis. Traditionally, sponsors were not private citizens like Franke – it was religious groups. According to a report from the Catholic church, they resettled 1.1 million refugees in the United States between 1987 and 2016.

Under a Trump administration policy (“Remain in Mexico”) that started in late January, Central American migrants from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, are sent back to Mexico once they reach the U.S. border, to wait while their asylum claims are processed. In March, when Franke met Ana, it was projected that nearly 100,000 people  tried to cross to the U.S. – Mexico border just in the month of March.

Sponsoring asylum seekers is not an answer to the number of people who are trying to enter the country, but it has been a method of welcoming refugees from into the U.S. from other parts of the world in times of crisis. Traditionally, sponsors were not private citizens like Franke – it was religious groups. According to a report from the Catholic church, they resettled 1.1 million refugees in the United States between 1987 and 2016.

Franke did not become a sponsor through a religious organization, but instead through a non profit called Showing Up For Racial Justice. The group runs a program that supports “folks on the caravan by connecting them with volunteer sponsors in the U.S. in order to give them a chance to get out of detention and plead their case for asylum,” according to their website.

It was clear to Franke that Ana was facing incredible odds, and Franke was reminded  of the case of Roxana Hernandez, another trans woman who died in ICE custody in 2018. After weeks in Tijuana, Ana’s number was called – she would be moved to the San Ysidro, San Diego, CA., Customs, and Border Protection processing and detention facility – the same facility that held Hernandez before her death.

Franke decided to become Ana’s sponsor, responsible for her legal resettlement in the U.S. – she filled out the paperwork and will be responsible for everything from finding her a place to stay, to help with medical care, and bringing her to court appointments. When Ana entered detention she had Franke as a sponsor and a man named Jose Campos as her attorney. Campos spent the first week of Hernandez’s detention trying to find a way to get in contact with Ana. They hoped that because Ana had what so many did not – representation and sponsorship – that she would be processed and released quickly. Instead, she has been detained since she was taken from Tijuana.

“The biggest reason why we want to get them out of there is that they’re not being recognized as trans women, they are being put in with the men,” said Meredith Vina over the phone.

Vina is a trans woman living in San Diego. She and her wife Eleanor are both retired, and they have been able to visit Ana in detention.

“For example, we went to see Ana* today and she was in a room with five other men. Now, fortunately for her, we talked to her and we said: ‘Are you okay? Do you feel safe?’ And she said that the men were respecting her and actually respecting her pronouns so far.”

Vina not only visits Ana in detention – she is also sponsoring a trans woman seeking asylum from Central America.

“The way I got involved – It was just all these caravans coming up to Tijuana, and having friends getting involved in going down there and bringing supplies,” Vina said. . “Getting to the point where we said ‘How can we get these people to the United States?’”

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Ricardo Aca swayed nervously behind a cluster of microphones before he disclosed to the group of protesters, counter-protesters and press that he was a DREAMer, a status that he could lose in 10 months if congressional action isn’t taken. Aca was speaking at a rally in downtown New York City today in support of a clean DREAM Act, as the third and ultimately final day of the government shutdown began.  

Six years ago, Aca was an undocumented immigrant working as a busboy at the Trump SoHo Hotel. Today, he has legal status and an associates degree in commercial photography. He is working towards a bachelors in international affairs at Baruch College. But with less than a year of certainty left and with Congress using DACA recipients as a leverage between party lines, Aca has decided to use his voice as his defense.

“We are here today because we condemn Donald Trump and congressional Republican leaders who have forced a government shutdown by insisting on Trump’s racist border wall and other anti-immigration policies,” Aca said.

Approximately nine hours after the rally, President Trump signed a bill that would reopen the government, funding it for the next three weeks and simultaneously putting a delay on legislative action for the DREAMers. This uncertainty has created a limbo for most recipients of the program and also puts those who are close to their renewal period ending at risk for deportation, which is why many of them have laid low in recent months. But not Aca, who interns at Make the Road New York, a public advocacy group for immigrant communities.  

“Because if I don’t fight for myself then nobody is going to do it for me. I need to fight not only for myself but also for my parents who have fought for me my entire life,” Aca said. “They deserve dignity and justice and so do those 11 million undocumented immigrants, and if I don’t do that nobody else is going to do it for me.”

Aca is one of the nearly 800,000 recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that was devised by the Obama administration in 2012 to allow for undocumented immigrants who entered the country as minors to defer deportation.

Under the current administration, the program has been used as leverage against the Democrats in exchange for reinforcing stricter immigration laws, ultimately leading to the government shutting down on Jan. 19.

“This is where I consider my home. I pay taxes over here,” Aca said. “This is where I go to school. This is where my family and my friends are and so for congress not to be able to come up with a fix that is more permanent is very upsetting.”

The 27-year-old came to the U.S. from Puebla, Mexico, when he was 14 years old. Aca’s mom had pursued legal routes to come to the country but when those failed she found a job as a seamstress in a factory in New York and later arranged for Aca and his younger sister to cross the border through Arizona.

“(Congress) doesn’t care about people of color or immigrants who come to this country to work hard,” said LaShonda Lawson, a speaker at the rally who works as a security guard at the Statue of Liberty. “America should stand for freedom and inclusiveness. That is what I think about every day when I go to work. I see hundreds of people come to the Statue of Liberty because she is a symbol of freedom.”

Most DACA recipients file for their renewal every two years in pursuit of that freedom. And at Monday’s rally, Aca shared what he and his fellow DREAMers have been doing since President Trump rescinded the program in September 2017.

“Instead of enjoying my life I have been constantly in the streets having to have my voice be heard because I know I deserve to be here,” Aca said. “This (amendment in the Senate) is only a temporary fix on a larger issue.”

Currently, the state of New York contains the third largest population of DREAMers, which has created a need for public officials and advocates to hold rallies, hearings and conferences in light of the recent attacks to the program. One of those officials leading the fight for young people like Aca is Carlos Menchaca, who serves as the city’s Chair of the Committee on Immigration.

“We are in front of Federal Plaza in New York City where New Yorkers from every corner of this city, like Ricardo, are saying one thing clearly: we want a DREAM Act now,” Menchaca said.

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After fleeing Peru in 2001 because he was persecuted for being gay, Jair Izquierdo settled in New Jersey, met his future husband, and started a life with him. But that life was brought to an abrupt halt last year when Izquierdo was deported for being in the country illegally.

Izquierdo and his partner, American citizen Richard Dennis of Jersey City, N.J., are one of thousands of binational same-sex couples in the United States that struggle with deportation. They were joined together by a civil union, but Izquierdo was an illegal immigrant, and because immigration law is federal, rather than state, Dennis was unable to sponsor him for citizenship.

“Most people don’t even realize how screwed up it is,” Dennis said of the current immigration law and how it applies to gay couples. “There’s so much subjectivity and fear and misinformation.”

The Defense of Marriage Act

The problem for couples like Dennis and Izquierdo is the Defense of Marriage Act, which ruled in 1996 that marriage is a legal union between a man and a woman. Because of DOMA, the federal government and its agencies, including those responsible for immigration benefits, are prohibited from recognizing same-sex marriages and civil unions.

“It’s very hard to explain to the many people who call us every day because it’s so patently unjust,” said Victoria Neilson, the legal director at Immigration Equality, a national organization that advocates for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered immigrants.

In February, the Obama administration announced that it would no longer continue to defend DOMA in the courts. However, it will be enforced until Congress or the Supreme Court votes to strike it down. In the meantime, the administration claims to be focusing on immigrants with criminal records.

This makes sense, Neilson said, because the backlog of immigration cases in each state would ease up, and many immigrants with clean records and ties to the community would have their cases closed. But whether this theory is being put into practice is a source of contention.

“It doesn’t really seem like the word has reached the field of the actual attorneys and ICE agents who are charged with deciding whether to put people in removal proceedings or not,” Neilson said, referring to the people working for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Dennis echoes Neilson’s concerns.

“They talk tough about secure communities and weeding out criminals, but I think that they just want to deport as many people as possible,” he said. “So the rhetoric doesn’t match the actions and it doesn’t match reality.”

Fighting for “Traditional” Marriage

Immigration Equality advocates for same-sex marriage so couples like Dennis and Izquierdo can be together. On the other side of the issue are the signers of the Manhattan Declaration, who believe in the traditional marriage view that DOMA reinforces.

Helen Alvare, a professor at the George Mason University School of Law, signed the declaration because she believes that maintaining traditional marriage protects children. She wants the government to consider new reforms that scholars and legislators have come up with that would result in what she calls “equal recognition.”

Then she heard the story of Dennis and Izquierdo. She called their separation “a huge tragedy in their lives,” but was left unconvinced that the laws of marriage should be changed.

“Is this situation really enough to overturn the argument that we really need to make something special of opposite sex unions?” Alvare asked. She said that traditional marriage still needs to be honored above all.

For couples like Dennis and Izquierdo, she suggested going some other way than “the marriage route.”

“Changing marriage as a tool for [immigration benefits] is not enough.”

Other Options

According to the Williams Institute at UCLA, there are an estimated 28,500 binational same-sex couples living in the United States. The options are limited if the foreign partner is in the country illegally, especially if it has been for longer than a year, like it was for Izquierdo.

“If someone’s here with a visa and they overstay, under current immigration law, it’s almost impossible to change from being here illegally to being here legally within the United States,” said Neilson. “And if a person leaves the country to try and legalize their status, if they have been here over a year, they can’t come back for ten years.”

Izquierdo applied for asylum after having been in the country for five years, and was denied. A series of appeals and requests to reopen the case have led to a court sending the decision back to the immigration judge, claiming the reasoning to not reopen were invalid.

Dennis said that they will move to Canada or Europe if Izquierdo cannot come back to the U.S., a common remedy among binational couples.

“We do see a fair amount of couples who end up giving up on the U.S. entirely and starting a new life in Canada,” Neilson said.

Ending DOMA

Since the current Congress has not passed much legislation, Immigration Equality is looking to the Supreme Court to repeal DOMA. Neilson suspects that the earliest this could happen is 2013, so Immigration Equality is pursuing other legislative actions in the meantime.

The Uniting American Families Act is pending, a bill that would amend immigration law to say “permanent partner” where “spouse” exists, so an American can sponsor his or her partner for immigration benefits.

There’s also the Respect for Marriage Act, which would legislatively appeal DOMA. Immigration Equality also encourages its clients to call their political representatives and ask for their help.

“When you work with lesbian and gay immigrant families, you see that it’s not an abstract right,” Neilson said. “It’s a fundamental desire to just be with the person you love. And that’s just such a heart-wrenching situation to talk to someone who finally found the person they want to be with, and they can’t be with them because of this unjust law. It’s got to go.”

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