Asking students to leave “will encourage schools to reopen,” said the US official.
New York:
Trump administration’s decision to ban international students from online courses “will encourage schools to reopen” while maintaining the “fraud protections” that are needed in international visa programs, said an official of internal security.
In a decision that will negatively impact hundreds of thousands of international students in the United States, including India, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said this week that international students at universities who Online courses will only be offered in the fall due to the COVID19 pandemic cannot remain in the United States and will be evicted if not transferred to a school with instructions in person.
The US State Department will not issue visas to students enrolled in fully online schools and / or programs for the fall semester, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection will not allow these students to enter in the United States, said the ICE press release.
Acting Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli said in an interview with CNN: “The current rules, the regulations that govern international students, allow for at most one online course, and so we’re massively extending the flexibility to a level never achieved before so schools can use hybrid models and design the reopening. “
“All that is not 100% online is the direction in which we are heading. We have to complete the temporary settlement, but it is more flexibility than we are considering before,” he said.
Cuccinelli said that “this now sets the rules for a semester, which we will finalize later this month, which will again encourage schools to reopen, recognizing that some of them are shifting their start dates, some are moving towards hybrid models, some online, some in person, and we try to accommodate as many as possible while maintaining the protections against fraud, etc., that are necessary in any type of international visa program. “
He added that students can take the courses online 100% from home, as happened in the last semester around March-April, when the COVID pandemic really hit.
At that time, the ICE “offered great flexibility at this stage in the prosecutor’s discretion to allow this sudden change in the middle of a semester”.
When asked that agencies essentially force universities to reopen, even if they have personally determined that they should not do so for public health reasons, he replied: “We are not forcing universities to reopen. However, if they don’t “re reopen this semester, there is no reason for someone with a student visa to be present in the country.
“They should go home and then they can go back when school opens. That’s what student visas are for and we want to adapt that to schools and we’re working hard to do that.”
Several congressmen and top U.S. educational institutions have decried the Trump administration’s policy change that will require international students in the U.S. on F-1 visas to take at least one course in person, or risk to be deported.
The new guidelines have created panic among international students, the majority of whom come from China and India.
Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sued the Department of Homeland Security and the ICE in the case.
