U.S. Orders Foreign Students To Leave

The Trump administration ruled that foreign students have to leave the country or risk deportation if they cannot attend in-person courses for the fall semester. Fully online courses that some universities have reverted to because of the coronavirus pandemic will be insufficient to stay in the United States. The notification issued by the Immigration and Customs Bureau (ICE) says that active students currently in the United States enrolled in courses that are fully online must depart the country or take other measures, such as transferring to schools with in-person instruction to remain in lawful status. The notification also clarified that foreign students attending schools adopting a hybrid model (A mixture of online and in-person classes) will be allowed to take more than one class online. These schools must certify to the Student and Exchange Visitors Program that their program is not entirely online. The notification was widely condemned by many educators, student bodies, and civil liberty activists. Some academic and American students began exploring ways to facilitate foreign students meeting the ICE requirements and staying in the United States, including one Harvard professor who offered an "in-person masked course" titled "What Pandemic? How the White House confronted international students more aggressively than the virus?"