International Students Worry Even as Trump Temporarily Restores Some Legal Statuses

When Karl Molden, a sophomore at Harvard University from Vienna, learned that the Trump administration had abruptly restored thousands of international students’ ability to legally study in the United States, he said he did not feel reassured.

After all, immigration officials have insisted that they could still terminate students’ legal status, even in the face of legal challenges, and the administration has characterized the matter as only a temporary reprieve.

“They shouldn’t tempt us into thinking that the administration will stop harassing us,” Mr. Molden said. “They will try to find other ways.”

Mr. Molden is not alone in his worry.

The dramatic shift from the administration on Friday came after scores of international students filed lawsuits saying that their legal right to study in the United States had been rescinded, often with minimal explanation. In some cases, students had minor traffic violations or other infractions. In others, there appeared to be no obvious reason for the revocations.

After learning that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had deleted their records from the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or SEVIS, many students sued to try to save their status. That prompted a flurry of emergency orders by judges that blocked the changes.

Students and their immigration lawyers said on Saturday that they were relieved for the temporary reprieve, but emphasized that it was just that — temporary.

Their sense of uncertainty was rooted in what Joseph F. Carilli, a Justice Department lawyer, told a federal judge on Friday. Mr. Carilli said that immigration officials had begun working on a new system for reviewing and terminating the records of international students and academics studying in the United States. Until the process was complete, he said, student records that had been purged from a federal database in recent weeks would be restored, along with the students’ legal status.

“This is a Band-Aid, but it’s not yet a successful surgery,” said Clay Greenberg, an immigration lawyer in New York who is representing several affected students. “The question that remains now is: Well, what is the new policy going to be?”

In the meantime, students have been left with the same anxieties as before, which began when the administration moved to cancel more than 1,500 student visas in recent weeks.

Kevin Zhang, a third-year law student at Columbia University from China, said virtually every Chinese student he knows is concerned about their visa status. People in the Chinese community on campus, he added, often exchange information about American and Chinese policies, trying to determine how it could affect them.

“It’s a very unstable and turbulent period,” said Mr. Zhang, 30.

Leo Gerdén, 22, a senior at Harvard from Sweden, described the Trump administration’s decision to reverse its international student visa revocations as “great news” but noted that the federal government is still demanding that Harvard turn over detailed information about its student body.

Mr. Gerdén, who studies economics and political science, has led rallies on Harvard’s campus to protest the administration’s efforts to target international students. Now, because of that activism, Mr. Gerdén said he feared he was a target.

“I have sort of accepted that being at commencement is not a guarantee anymore,” he said. “I’m definitely worried, but it is a risk that I’ve accepted because I think that what we’re fighting for here is just so much bigger than any one individual.”

Recently, Mr. Gerdén’s high school guidance counselor asked him for advice because several Swedish students had been accepted to the University of Notre Dame and Georgetown University, but they were now wary of moving to the United States, a sentiment that once felt almost inconceivable.

“The U.S. has always been the top dream for many people, and especially for me,” he said. “The entire college life and all the opportunities that come with studying at a university here has put U.S. universities in a very special position that is now being taken away.”

Evan Sulpizio Estrada, 20, a sophomore at Tufts University from San Diego, said his friends who were international students had in recent weeks expressed fear about their situation.

After the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts Ph.D. student from Turkey, many international students at the school stopped attending classes or eating in the cafeteria because they were afraid of being arrested, Mr. Sulpizio Estrada said. Still, he added, many of them were trying their best to continue living normal college lives.

Louie Yang, 18, a freshman from Beijing at Tufts, said that while some of his friends had expressed concerns about visa revocations, he had tried to not let politics distract from his academics.

“I’m not so worried about it,” Mr. Yang said.

Mr. Greenberg, the immigration lawyer, said he believed the situation exemplified “the unpredictability and chaos” coming from the Trump administration.

In recent weeks, Mr. Greenberg said, he has continued to be flooded with similar questions from international students: “Should I leave? Am I going to be arrested if I don’t leave tomorrow?”