On July 6, 2020 ICE announced that international students schools operating entirely online may not take a full online course load and remain in the United States. The U.S. Department of State will not issue visas to students enrolled in schools and/or programs that are fully online for the fall semester nor will U.S. Customs and Border Protection permit these students to enter the United States.

Active students currently in the United States enrolled in such programs must depart the country or take other measures, such as transferring to a school with in-person instruction or applying for leave to remain in lawful status. If not, they may face immigration consequences including, but not limited to, the initiation of removal proceedings.

This announcement blindsided academic institutions grappling with the logistical challenges of safely resuming classes as the coronavirus pandemic continues around the world and received widespread criticism and such renowned universities like Harvard and MIT have filed a lawsuit seeking the federal court to temporarily block this rule.

The new order threatens millions of legal F-1 students with deportation unless they put their health and their lives at risk by attending in person classes instead of entirely online ones.

The order would also throw the entire US educational system into chaos by forcing US schools and colleges to gamble with the health and lives of their students by offering in person classes even as the number of coronavirus infections in the US passes the 3 million mark.

It seems like the only purpose of the new order, which combines the utmost in irrationality with a cruelty that verges on sadism, is to force hundreds of thousands of foreign students, most of them, to leave the United States.

It’s hard not to view the new rule as an attempt by the Trump administration to exploit a global health pandemic for racist and xenophobic political ends as many of those foreign students are from China, India , South Korea and other Asian or other nonwhite countries.

Just as American schools and universities, which financially depend in large part on foreign students, would be devastated if Trump’s latest order is allowed to take effect, this country’s democracy is also in danger of disappearing. With executive decrees which entirely bypass Congressional action, Trump is undermining our democracy itself.