2 WPI students part of lawsuit against federal government over visa terminations
Two students from Worcester Polytechnic Institute are part of a group suing the federal government for revoking their student visas earlier this month.
Five international students — represented by four American Civil Liberties Union affiliates in New England and law firm Shaheen & Gordon — filed a federal class action lawsuit last week in New Hampshire federal court that aims to represent more than 100 students in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island and Puerto Rico who had their F-1 student immigration status revoked by President Donald Trump's administration.
Of the four students who are plaintiffs, two of them — Hangrui Zhang and Haoyang An, both of China — are students at WPI in Worcester, according to the lawsuit.
Read more: Visas revoked for 13 UMass Amherst, 4 Worcester Polytechnic Institute students
The revocations at WPI took place on April 9, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit states that both students' goals to complete their Ph.D programs are now in jeopardy.
The other students are Linkhith Babu Gorrela, Thanuj Kumar Gummadavelli and Manikanta Pasula, all of India and students at Rivier University in New Hampshire.
The defendants in the case are the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS); U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Boston Field Office; the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Manchester Sub-Field Office; DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit asks the court to reinstate their F-1 student status, which would allow them to continue their studies, according to a press release issued Friday from the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire.
According to the lawsuit, the visa terminations disrupted the students' education in the middle of a semester as they worked to achieve degrees and followed all rules required of them, according to the ACLU. Gorrela's graduation date for his master's program, for example, is May 20.
With terminated F-1 statuses, the students are also now at risk of detention and deportation, the ACLU wrote.
The terminations conducted by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security have been occurring since at least March 1, according to the ACLU.
'We continue to be alarmed by the Trump administration's sudden termination of student statuses at universities across the country without any notice or stated explanation,' said Gilles Bissonnette, legal director of the ACLU of New Hampshire. 'International students are a vital community in our state's universities, and no administration should be allowed to circumvent the law to unilaterally strip students of status, disrupt their studies, and put them at risk of deportation.'
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