Boston judge blocks four-year cap on foreign student and journalist visas

A day before a Department of Homeland Security rule was due to take effect, U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV in Boston blocked the Trump administration from capping how long foreign students, scholars and journalists may stay in the United States without applying for an extension.

The rule, adopted in July, would have replaced duration of status, the system used for nearly five decades, with fixed terms. F visas for students and J visas for exchange visitors would have been limited to four years. I visas for foreign journalists, which can now run for years, would have been cut to 240 days. Chinese journalists would have received 90 days, with 90-day extensions. Students would have been restricted from taking a second degree at the same level, changing field, or transferring university without a new grant of status. Extensions would have sat with DHS officers. A refusal would not have been appealable.

Saylor, nominated by President George W. Bush, granted a preliminary injunction to a coalition of university, teacher and journalist unions and higher-education groups. He scheduled a further hearing for 2 October. DHS did not immediately say whether it would appeal. About 1.6 million people hold F visas and about 500,000 hold J visas.

The written opinion is unusually direct. Saylor wrote that the government's reasons were exceptionally weak, that the national-security claim borders on the absurd, and that officials did not explain how a four-year cap would stop visa fraud. He noted the administration's own estimate that compliance costs would likely exceed $250 million in the first year. Notwithstanding the scale of the likely harm, he wrote, the rationales did not meet the Administrative Procedure Act.

Duration of status has let students remain for the length of a programme plus any authorised practical training. A doctoral student in the life sciences often needs more than four years. Postdoctoral researchers, who fill a large share of U.S. laboratory benches, rotate on J or related statuses that the new cap would have truncated. STAT reported that international researchers make up a large part of the biomedical workforce the rule would have reached. Saylor recorded that major research universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, enrol high shares of foreign graduate students.

The administration has argued that duration of status produced forever students who enrol to avoid leaving. Saylor accepted that the current system is not without its problems. He said the chosen fix was not a repair. It was a design to substantially restrict the overall number of foreign students, researchers, professors, and journalists in the United States.

For journalists the change would have been sharper than for students. A 240-day I visa, or 90 days for Chinese nationals, would have forced news organisations to queue extensions inside a year, with no appeal if an officer said no. Foreign bureaux in Washington and New York staff many beats with I-visa reporters. The coalition that sued included journalist unions for that reason.

The Presidents' Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration called the injunction recognition of serious and irreparable harm to students, institutions, communities, the economy and research. That is advocacy language. The court record is more specific: first-year compliance costs above $250 million, a four-year cap that does not match the length of a Ph.D., an unappealable extension process, and a national-security theory the judge said the government failed to connect to the cap.

The injunction holds the July rule. It does not decide the case. On 2 October the same court will hear fuller argument. Until then, duration of status remains the rule that international students, postdocs and foreign correspondents actually live under. The administration can amend the record, appeal, or try a narrower regulation. What it cannot do on 15 September is start the clock it wrote in July.