Four international students in Michigan sue the Trump administration

Four international students from the University of Michigan and Wayne State University have sued the Trump administration, challenging its termination of their right to remain in the country legally.

The students, who are being represented by attorneys from the ACLU of Michigan, have also requested a preliminary injunction that would reinstate their F-1 student status so that they can continue their studies and bar the federal government from arresting or deporting them.

“This administration continues to act as if the most basic constitutional requirements don’t apply to them,” said Loren Khogali, executive director of the ACLU of Michigan, in a statement.

“The right to due process is one of our most fundamental constitutional rights, requiring that a person receive sufficient notice to respond and challenge a government action,” she said. “In this case, the Trump administration failed to provide any advance notification to students that they were stripping them of their student immigrant status and offered no viable opportunity to respond or challenge it.”

The lawsuit names Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Todd Lyons, and Detroit ICE field office Director Robert Lynch as defendants.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not respond to inquiries from MLive. ICE referred questions to the U.S. State Department, which also did not respond.

None of the students in question had been active in campus protests, said the complaint, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. None had a criminal record.

“What seems to connect students targeted by this newfound and unlawful policy is that the students had some encounter with some American law enforcement official at some point in the past, no matter how innocuous,” the complaint said.

Qiuyi Yang, a Chinese student working on a doctorate in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan, had only a few parking tickets, the complaint said.

Xiangyun Bu, a Chinese master’s student in mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, seems to have come to the federal government’s attention because he applied to enter the U.S. on a visitor’s visa in 2022 to visit his then-girlfriend for a semester but voluntarily withdrew his application after a border patrol officer told him a stay of that length wouldn’t be allowed.

Chinmay Deore, an undergraduate student from India studying computer science at Wayne State University, has lived in the U.S. on and off since 2004 and graduated from high school in Michigan, the complaint said. He had only a speeding ticket and a handful of parking tickets.

Yogesh Joshi, a Nepalese Ph.D. student studying anatomy and cell biology at Wayne State University whose eight-month-old child is a U.S. citizen, had one parking ticket. He was arrested in 2022 following a domestic dispute but never charged or convicted.

The lawsuit also alleges that the Trump administration did not follow the law when revoking the students’ right to remain in the U.S.

Yang, Deore and Bu were told the reason for the revocation was “otherwise failing to maintain status: Individual identified in criminal records check and/or has had their VISA revoked,” the complaint said. Joshi was told the reason was “other.”

But all of them had fulfilled all of the requirements to maintain their F-1 student status, the complaint says, and the revocation of a student’s visa – which gives permission to enter the country and is separate from permission to remain here – is not a reason allowed under federal law to terminate legal residency.

“The unlawful terminations of Plaintiffs’ F-1 status are part of a clear policy and pattern/practice, whether written or not, perpetuated by Defendants to cancel the status of hundreds, if not thousands, of immigrant students nationwide,” the lawsuit said.

Dozens of international students from at least eight of Michigan’s public universities and hundreds around the country have seen their visas or their permission to remain in the country revoked over the past week or so.

“No administration should be allowed to circumvent the law to unilaterally strip students of their status, disrupt their studies, and put them at risk of deportation,” said Ramis Wadood, staff attorney at the ACLU of Michigan, in a statement.

“These cruel and illegal government actions have real-life consequences. Status terminations don’t just disrupt the lives of the students being targeted; the government’s actions will inevitably deter future international scholars from choosing Michigan and the United States as their academic destination,” he said.