Posts tagged “STEM OPT”

The numbers are depressing.  The United States used to be a magnet for international students.  But now, the Trump Administration is discouraging, deterring, and repelling students from across the world with its student-adverse policies. The number of new enrollments and visa issuances is down from 17-36%.  It is not only the students that are severely impacted, but the American universities and colleges as well.  In light of these Trump-initiated policies, this felt like a good time to update our article on student visa denials. 

To highlight some of the trends and problems that we have seen over the past year, we have just published an article citing to the 44 reasons for a student visa denial.  The underlying law, regulations, and Department of State guidance to consular officers remains, for the most part, unchanged. But what has changed is the interpretation and implementation at US embassies and consulates around the world.

In Part 1, we described the materials recently received from a Freedom of Information Act request to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The materials are not only eye-opening but indeed shocking: they show that the students were let down by delinquent government and university actors that failed to warn them of the scam. Most mind-boggling: the US government is now using its own delinquency as a sword against these students in permanently barring them from the United States and using shell-game tactics to make it is as difficult as possible to challenge the bars. Here, we provide additional details from those ICE reports: The Homeland Security Investigations Wilmington office identified approximately 1,925 STEM OPT students associated with AzTech. HSI administratively arrested 15 STEM OPT students. (An administrative arrest is the arrest of a foreign individual for a civil — not criminal — violation of U.S. immigration laws. These cases are then…