Washington – In a new report, the U.S. government explains why it targeted thousands of people and why their legal status could be revoked as part of a crackdown on foreign students.

The new information came out in lawsuits that some of the students who had their status quickly revoked in the past few weeks with little or no explanation filed.

In the past month, foreign students in the U.S. have been shocked to find out that their records had been deleted from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement database of students. Some ran away out of fear of being sent back to their home countries, while others quit school to go back home.

After a lot of court challenges, federal officials said on Friday that the government was restoring the legal status of foreign students while it made a plan for how to handle future terminations. It told the court about the new policy in a paper that came out over the weekend and explains a number of situations in which students’ status can be revoked, such as when their visas to enter the U.S. are revoked.

Brad Banias, an immigration lawyer who is helping a student whose status was ended, said that the new rules give ICE a lot more power than the old ones did, which didn’t count losing your visa as a reason to lose your legal status. People who had their student visas taken away used to be able to stay in the U.S. to finish their studies, but they would not be able to come back if they left the country.

“They were free to have the State Department take away the students’ visas and send them home, even if they hadn’t done anything wrong,” Banias said.

A lot of the students whose visas were revoked or who lost their legal standing said they had only slight offences like traffic violations on their records. Some of them had no idea why they were being picked on at all.

At a meeting on Tuesday, lawyers for the government gave some information about Akshar Patel’s case. Patel is Banias’ client and is an international student in Texas studying information systems. This month, Patel’s status was taken away and then restored. He is now asking a preliminary court to stop him from being removed.

According to court documents and the hearing, officials from the Department of Homeland Security said they checked the National Crime Information Centre, a database run by the FBI that has a lot of information about crimes, for the names of people with student visas. It lists suspects, people who have gone missing, and people who have been caught, even if they have never been charged with a crime or had charges dropped.

The search of the database turned up about 6,400 students, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes said at the meeting on Tuesday. Someone named Patel was one of the teachers. In 2018, he was pulled over and charged with reckless driving. In the end, the charge was dropped, which is also recorded in NCIC.

Patel’s name is on a spreadsheet with the names of 734 other kids whose names showed up in NCIC. Someone from Homeland Security was sent that spreadsheet, and within 24 hours, they answered, “Please terminate all in SEVIS.” That’s a different database with a list of people who are legally allowed to be students in the U.S.

Reyes said that the short amount of time meant that no one had looked at each student’s record to see why their name showed up in NCIC.

“If someone had taken a beat, all of this could have been avoided,” said Reyes, who was hired by President Joe Biden. She said the government had shown “complete lack of care for people who have come into this country.”

When colleges found out that the students were no longer legally allowed to be there, it caused a lot of chaos and misunderstanding. College officials say that legal positions were usually changed when schools told the government that a student was no longer enrolled at the school.

This spring, some schools told students they could be deported if they didn’t stop working or going to class right away.

Even though some of the students were marked as “failure to maintain status,” government lawyers said that the change in the database did not mean they had lost their legal status. Lawyers said that it was meant to be a “investigative red flag.”

Police officer Andre Watson of the Department of Homeland Security said, “Mr. Patel is legally present in the United States.” “He cannot be detained or sent away right away.”

Reyes didn’t issue a preliminary order and told the lawyers on both sides to work out a deal so Patel could stay in the U.S.