A Chinese doctoral student at Dartmouth College is about to have his visa reinstated after it was revoked without explanation last week by Homeland Security.
Xiaotian Liu, who is studying computer science at the Ivy League college, had his F-1 student status terminated on Friday, with his lawyers arguing in court documents that the move was done without prior notification and insisted he had not taken part in any of the student protests that swept the college last year. It comes as the Trump administration has begun a new wave of visa revocations for international students studying at American universities.
Dartmouth officials said they discovered the termination independently while reviewing Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) records on Friday and informed Liu the same day, according to court documents viewed by Fox News Digital.
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A federal judge said Wednesday that she will order the federal government to re-instate the visa, according to The Dartmouth, a student newspaper at the college.
His legal team argued that the revocation was unlawful under federal administrative law and a violation of due process under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Todd Lyons were named as plaintiffs.
Dartmouth described the termination as “not standard or normal procedure.” Liu’s lawyers insisted he had not committed a crime and had no disciplinary issues.
“He has not committed any crime or even a traffic violation,” his lawyers wrote in the court documents. “Nor has he shown any violence (or even participated in any protest) in the United States or elsewhere.”
Liu came to the United States in 2016 to study computer science and obtained a G.P.A. of 4.0 out of 4.0 for his Masters program, they wrote.
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Assistant U.S. Attorney Raphael Katz, a lawyer for the federal government, did not have an explanation in court on Wednesday.
“I don’t have the facts to explain why the change in status happened at this point,” Katz said, per The Dartmouth. The outlet reports that one other international student at the college had their visa revoked.
The forthcoming decision was welcomed by Gilles Bissonnette, the legal director of the ACLU of New Hampshire, who said that Liu can now continue studying and working computer science.
“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,” Bissonnette said.
President Donald Trump has suspended federal funding to every Ivy League, besides Penn and Dartmouth, over investigations into anti-Israel protests that have taken place on their campuses since October 2023. Funding for dozens of other universities has also been impacted by investigations for the same reason.
The Trump administration has promised to be more aggressive in ending campus antisemitism after saying President Joe Biden did not hold universities accountable for their violent protests.
The administration has also made moves to detain and deport foreign students who participated in or orchestrated anti-Israel protests at American universities.
Dartmouth, located in Hanover, New Hampshire, is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution.
Fox News Digital’s Greg Wehner and Elizabeth Pritchett as well as The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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