Class action lawsuit seeks to protect international students at risk of deportation

• A lawyer is pursuing a class action lawsuit against the federal government on behalf of international students facing deportation.
• A judge recently issued a preliminary injunction restoring the visa status of 133 students.
• The lawsuit alleges the government unlawfully revoked the students’ visas without due process.
• The lawyer aims to expand the lawsuit to include potentially thousands of affected students.

The lawyer who secured the legal visitor status for 133 international students in federal court last week is seeking to expand his lawsuit to potentially include thousands of plaintiffs.

Charles Kuck filed a motion late last week seeking permission to roll his case into a class action lawsuit. It seeks to add Secretary of State Marco Rubio as a defendant, “challenging the legality of Secretary Rubio to coordinate the mass revocation of student visas without notice.”

The motion added that “Congress delegated the authority to revoke ‘a visa,’ but it could not delegate the authority to revoke all visas at one fell swoop.”

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Victoria Marie Calvert of the Northern District of Georgiaissued a preliminary injunctionin favor of Kuck and his clients, extending the temporary restraining order she had already issued against the administration of President Donald Trump.

The original lawsuit, which named U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi as lead defendant, argued that the federal government had unlawfully revoked the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVIS) authority for those 133 current and former students, stripping them of the right to work and barring them from re-entering the country if they happened to leave.

Calvert’s order required U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to restore the visitor status of the 27 foreign nationals who were attending a Georgia college or university or doing post-graduate work. It also required ICE to do the same for 106 similar plaintiffs in other states.

Calvert determined that Kuck’s clients had a good chance of winning their case by proving that the government had acted in an “arbitrary and capricious” way against them. She also agreed with Kuck’s request to bundle the cases of the 106 plaintiffs outside the Northern District of Georgia with those within the district to reduce legal costs and the workload on the court system.

Kuck is using similar logic to expand his case to class action status.

A 204-page exhibit to his new motion, which was filed on Thursday, said 4,000 to 8,000 students had their visitor status terminated since March 24, “without due process, without notice, and in violation of the regulations.” It said a class action “is now the only avenue to keep from wasting judicial resources and the protection of the class members’ rights.”

It accused the government of unlawfully subjecting foreign student visitors to the risk of incarceration and deportation.