A coalition of higher education associations and labor unions is asking a federal judge to throw out the Trump administration’s rule ending “duration of status” for international students, exchange visitors and foreign journalists. The case (Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration v. Department of Homeland Security, No. 1:26-cv-13799) was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts and posted publicly by the Presidents’ Alliance.
It comes less than a month before the rule is set to take effect, along with 30 senators asking the State Department to clear a student visa backlog before fall classes start.
Plaintiffs are the Presidents’ Alliance, which represents close to 600 colleges and universities; NAFSA: Association of International Educators; the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts; the American Federation of Teachers; Brown University’s graduate worker union; The NewsGuild-CWA; the United Auto Workers; and UAW Local 2322, which represents graduate workers at UMass Amherst and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. No individual students are named.
Defendants are DHS, ICE, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and acting ICE Director David Venturella. It is the second union-led challenge to the administration’s education agenda this year, after the teachers union suit over $2 billion in blocked education research money.
Why It Matters
“Duration of Status” has set the terms for how long foreign students can stay in the United States for more than four decades. A student admitted under it stays as long as they remain enrolled and follow the conditions of the visa, with no departure date printed on the I-94.
The replacement of requiring DHS to verify term lengths and more adds more burden to USCIS, an agency the complaint says is already carrying an 11.3 million case backlog.
The money at stake is not abstract for colleges. International graduate enrollment has already fallen far enough to trigger layoffs and program cuts in 2026, and full-pay foreign students have long subsidized seats for domestic ones — one of the forces behind what colleges charge everyone else.
The Details
Published July 17 and effective September 15, the rule admits F, J and I nonimmigrants for a set period, according to DHS’s own summary of the final rule. The specifics, as international student offices have summarized them:
- Admission runs for the shorter of the program end date on Form I-20 or DS-2019, or four years, plus a 30-day grace period.
- Extensions require Form I-539 with USCIS, at a filing fee of $420 or more, decided at the agency’s discretion.
- Graduate students are blocked from changing academic programs; undergraduate transfers and program changes face new limits.
- Any student who completes a degree is barred from starting another at the same or a lower level — a permanent bar, the complaint says, that cannot be reset by leaving and seeking readmission.
- The post-completion grace period for F-1 students drops from 60 days to 30. Foreign journalists on I visas would file extensions every 240 days.
- Students admitted before September 15 generally continue under the current system until they travel abroad, file an extension, or hit transition deadlines in the fall of 2030.
The complaint brings three counts under the Administrative Procedure Act. DHS conceded at least $443 million a year in compliance costs while attaching no number to the benefits and declining to quantify the enrollment decline the rule would cause. DHS allowed 32 days of public comment on a rewrite of three visa categories, then took close to a year to issue the final version, against Executive Order 12866’s request for at least 60 days on significant rules.
And the coalition argues DHS invented a category of inadmissibility that appears nowhere in the Immigration and Nationality Act, since a student pursuing a second master’s still meets every statutory test for an F visa. That last claim matters for a population that already navigates a separate financing system, from private lenders to refinancing an international student loan.
By The Numbers
More than 1.8 million F-1 and 514,000 J-1 nonimmigrants were in the country in 2024, and NAFSA puts their contribution at $42.9 billion and roughly 355,000 jobs in 2024-25. DHS logged about 22,000 public comments.
The agency’s central evidence was roughly 2,100 people who entered as F-1 students between 2000 and 2010 and remained in F-1 status as of April 2025 — about 0.1% of the 1.6 million SEVIS records it reviewed.
Its overstay figure for F, M and J visa holders in fiscal 2023 was 2.84%, a number that counts unverified departures alongside actual overstays. A NAFSA survey cited in the filing found 49% of current international students would not have enrolled under a fixed admission period, and the Association of American Universities projected a 163% jump in USCIS filings.
The Other Side
DHS frames fixed terms as a fraud and national security measure, giving officers set points to verify that someone still qualifies for the status they hold. Simon Hankinson of the Heritage Foundation (the same organization behind the model state law for Trump’s higher education compact) told NPR the effect “is not going to be huge” and that the government gains better oversight of the foreign student population.
A near-identical proposal appeared in 2020 and was withdrawn in 2021.
How This Connects
The rule sits on top of a financing squeeze already reshaping graduate programs. Federal caps took effect this year, and private student loan volume is projected to climb as much as 85% as borrowers cover the gap.
International students cannot access federal loans at all, so a four-year admission ceiling on a six-year Ph.D. is a financing question as much as an immigration one.
The coalition wants the rule stayed before September 15 and has signaled it will seek a preliminary injunction. Watch whether other plaintiffs (state attorneys general filed comments opposing the rule) bring parallel suits. If no judge intervenes, colleges have roughly three weeks to prepare advisers and student information systems for a filing process none of them have run at scale.
Editor: Colin Graves
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