On September 15, the U.S. government will stop admitting foreign students to the United States for a period referred to as “duration of status” — that is, as long as the aliens are studying in the United States. After that date, F-1 nonimmigrant students will be admitted for the length of their courses of study in this country, capped at four years, plus 30 days to arrive and settle in and 30 days to pack up and depart. Anyone who needs more time must file an extension with USCIS or depart and be readmitted. DHS published that final rule on July 17 after receiving and considering “close to 22,000 public comments”. This is the biggest change to the student visa system since ICE’s web-based tracking database, the “Student and Exchange Visitor Information System” (SEVIS), came online, and few outside international student offices are talking about it.
I spent 24 years as a deportation officer and then served as a deputy field office director for ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations in New York and have worked both ends of this system: the front end, where a foreign national gets a document that lets him board a plane; and the back end, where an immigration officer with a caseload tries to find him after he stops going to class.
What the July 17 final rule will do is take a piece of the front end out of the hands of people who do not work for the federal government. That is worth understanding, because of who those people are.
The Center’s Andrew Arthur saw this coming nine years ago.
In June 2017, while California's SB 54 was still moving through the Assembly, he published a report titled “Limiting Foreign Student Visas in Sanctuaries?” and asked a question no one in the sanctuary fight had bothered to ask.
“Sanctuary jurisdictions”, he noted, were treating their position as a one-way street. They wanted the benefits that come with legal immigration but wanted to distance themselves from enforcement.
If that was the posture, Arthur argued, then the federal government needed to reconsider how it delivered immigration benefits inside those jurisdictions. He pointed specifically at the immigration approvals that allow schools to enroll foreign students at all.
Arthur and I have talked about that piece recently, and he forwarded it to me because he wrote it before many major changes to that system that have further impeded immigration enforcement efforts, and he was right about nearly all of it.
Reporting Requirements
Here is what he found, and what remains at the heart of the matter.
A school cannot enroll a foreign national on a nonimmigrant student visa — either as an “F-1” academic student or an “M-1” vocational student — unless ICE’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) first certifies the school.
Once certified, the school must appoint a principal designated school official (PDSO) and any number of additional designated school officials (DSOs).
Those school officials must be regularly employed members of the school administration, must have an office on campus, and must be U.S. citizens or “lawful permanent residents” (i.e., “green card holders”).
Those school officers create the student's record in SEVIS and issue the Form I-20 the would-be foreign student must take to the consular interview abroad to receive the visa and then present to the CBP officer at the port of entry.
DSOs also must confirm that the student showed up and upload the physical address where the student is living in the United States into SEVIS.
DSOs must also report to ICE in SEVIS when the alien student is taking a reduced course load, fails to maintain status, or incurs a disciplinary action following a criminal conviction.
If the student is admitted to the country but then fails to report to campus, the DSO must terminate the alien’s record with a “No Show” entry, which sends an automatic alert to ICE.
At state universities, every one of those school officers is a state employee — and therein lies the contradiction.
Communicating with ICE
States can and have passed laws telling its police not to honor ICE criminal detainers, and they can and have told their jails not to provide ICE release dates for alien criminals, and many sanctuaries have done both.
Meanwhile the same sanctuary state's payroll includes staff who transmit the current residential address of a foreign national to ICE as a legally mandated matter of course, every business day, because federal law makes transmission of such alien student information a condition of the school's certification.
Congress added that condition to the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) in section 641 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA), now codified at 8 U.S.C. § 1372.
Subsection (d) therein says the provision of the specified information is a condition of the institution's continued approval and of its authority to issue the documents that establish a student's visa eligibility, and that if the institution fails to provide it, those approvals and that authority “shall be revoked or denied”. “Shall”. Not “may”. In 30 years, that provision has never been successfully used against a major institution.
So, the question I am continually asked, and the one I asked myself when Arthur sent me his report, is whether the federal government can simply pull the student visa authority from every public university in a sanctuary state.
The sanctuary states of California and New York would take a serious hit if DHS were to do so.
As of 2024, the Golden State had 821 certified schools with active students and 237,763 student records, roughly 15 percent of the national total. New York had 480 schools and 172,522 records.
The University of California San Diego (UCSD) alone carried 12,614 F-1 students in 2024, UC’s flagship, Berkeley, had 11,809, and UCLA 11,116.
The community colleges are in there too, Santa Monica with nearly 3,000 and UCLA Extension with 2,300.
Revoke Certifications in Sanctuaries?
But the answer is no, DHS cannot revoke school certifications, at least not that way, and we already know it because it was tried.
On May 22, 2025, DHS ordered the termination of Harvard University's SEVP certification, for what the department termed “pro-terrorist conduct”.
Harvard filed a complaint in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts (D. Mass.) the next morning and Judge Allison Burroughs issue a temporary restraining order (TRO) the same day.
Judge Burroughs issued a preliminary injunction against DHS on June 20, granted longer relief on June 23, and by August 6 the government had stipulated that it would not enforce the May 22 letter to revoke Harvard’s certification.
That case did not fail because the revocation authority was missing. It failed because the paper underneath it would not hold.
DHS’s action read as punishment for Harvard’s politics rather than as the documented result of documented reporting failures, and that gave Harvard a retaliation claim and a claim under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) at the same time.
Anyone who wants to use the revocation authority in section 1372(d) should treat that case as instruction on how not to proceed.
Which brings me to what has changed in California since Arthur first analyzed these questions in June 2017.
The state’s SB 54, the “California Values Act”, one of the most onerous sanctuary laws in the country, became law in October 2017 and took effect the following January.
The Ninth Circuit largely upheld it in 2019, holding that even if the law obstructs federal immigration enforcement, California has the constitutional prerogative under the Tenth Amendment and that amendment’s “anticommandeering doctrine” to decline to assist the feds.
Fine. That is settled and I am not going to relitigate it here. But the state did not stop there.
California Safe Haven Schools Act
On September 20, 2025, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed AB 49, the “California Safe Haven Schools Act”, with urgency language that made it effective on signature.
That law bars immigration officers from nonpublic areas of school sites without a judicial warrant, subpoena, or court order, and it prohibits local educational agencies and their personnel from disclosing education records or information about a student or the student's family to immigration authorities, in writing, verbally, or in any other manner, without written parental consent or a court order.
Newsom signed SB 98 the same day, requiring postsecondary institutions to notify their campuses of immigration enforcement activity as it occurs.
AB 495, the “Family Preparedness Plan Act of 2025”, which the governor’s office contends “Helps protect parents’ legal rights and supports security for children in case they are separated from their parents due to immigration enforcement”, followed in October.
Read AB 49 next to the SEVIS reporting requirements and you will see the collision.
AB 49 governs K-12 agencies, not university DSOs, but SEVP also certifies public high schools to enroll F-1 students for up to a year.
A California public high school with an approved Form I-17, ICE certification, is a local educational agency governed by AB 49 and an approved institution that operates under the requirements of 8 U.S.C. 1372 at the same time.
The only thing keeping those two obligations from open conflict is a four-word exception in the state statute for disclosures “required by ... federal law”.
No court has specified where that divide applies, but if a California state attorney general ever advised that entering a student's physical residence into SEVIS is not required by federal law, or that a “No Show” termination is a discretionary disclosure to an immigration authority, we will find out the hard way, on a statute Congress drafted in 1996 for an agency (the former Immigration and Naturalization Service) that no longer exists.
Objections
Now let me answer the objections, because they are all coming and three of them are serious.
The Tenth Amendment does not save the state under these facts. The Ninth Circuit protected California's refusal to help ICE, but it did not hold that California may keep a discretionary federal privilege while refusing the condition Congress attached to it, and the difference is not academic.
On July 24, Judge David Dugan of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois in U.S. v. Illinois, a federal challenge to the Illinois DREAM Act under 8 U.S.C. § 1623(a), threw out the state's anticommandeering defense and held Illinois's in-state tuition provisions were invalid under the Supremacy Clause in Article VI of the U.S. Constitution.
The federal government has now obtained permanent injunctions challenging in-state tuition for illegal aliens on that theory in Texas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Illinois. It sued California last November and Connecticut, New York, and Vermont in August. It lost in Minnesota and appealed. That litigation is the model, not because of tuition, but because of its shape. It identifies a specific statutory condition, applies it institution by institution, and never asks a court to require a state government to do anything — except follow federal law.
The next objection is that the students would be punished and the legislators would not, and that one has real force. Pull a campus's certification and you strand foreign students who did everything asked of them, while the members of the state legislature who passed the obstructing law lose nothing.
The answer is that section 1372(d) as written gives DHS one tool and it is a sledgehammer. Revoke or deny. There is no fine, no probation, no suspension of new I-20 issuance while the existing students finish.
A school that files three weeks late faces the same nominal penalty as a school that refuses to file at all, which in practice means no one faces any punishment until the stakes are high enough to justify the maximum sanction, and by then the record cannot carry it.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville's (R-Ala.) “Student Visa Integrity Act”, S. 2555, fixes exactly this seeming unfairness.
It would impose monetary penalties for reporting noncompliance, suspend noncomplying schools’ authority to issue I-20s until they comply, and terminate approval outright if the failure is not cured inside 180 days.
Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) introduced the House companion bill, H.R.7063, in January. Both have been stuck in committee ever since.
The last objection is mine, and it is the one nobody in this debate wants to say out loud: Decertifying schools would make my old job harder.
A No Show termination alerts ICE. At that point, the agency’s Counterterrorism and Criminal Exploitation Unit (CTCEU) screens the record, and the cases that do not meet national security or public safety criteria go to ERO.
In New York, ERO must work that lead without a release date, without custody access, and often without a current address, because the state has decided not to provide any of it.
Decertify a campus and you have converted several thousand compliant students into out-of-status aliens whom the same field office must locate in the same city that will not assist.
I ran those caseloads. I know what that math looks like. The remedy exists to be credible, not to be detonated, and a graduated ladder of penalties that ends in termination will produce more compliance in a year than a statute nobody has ever managed to invoke has produced in 30 years.
Build a Penalty Ladder
So what should Congress actually do?
Build the penalty ladder in S. 2555 and pass it. State in plain text that compliance with section 1372 is required by federal law within the meaning of any state or local nondisclosure provision, that no state may condition compliance with it on a warrant or on parental consent, and that the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (“FERPA”, a 1974 law that governs access to academic records and student privacy) does not restrict it, which resolves the AB 49 carve-out without commanding a state to do anything.
Add a statutory basis for withdrawal of certification where a policy of the institution or of its governing authority prohibits its DSOs from complying with section 1372, so that the trigger is the obstructing policy and not the zip code.
Make E-Verify participation and an annual institutional certification of the conditions of the I-17 mandatory, the way Congress conditions Title IV funding on dozens of institutional behaviors. Require site visits and audits of at least 1 percent of certified schools each year and terminate certification automatically for any school that enrolls no students for two consecutive years, which in 2024 would have retired 1,082 dormant certifications.
Publish reporting compliance by campus so trustees, alumni, and taxpayers can see the record before DHS ever has to act on it. And require ICE to report how many student status violator leads were closed for lack of state or local cooperation, because that is the number that turns this from an argument about universities into an argument about consequences, and no one has ever been made to produce it.
One more thing, in an exercise of candor.
As of today, there is no public case of a California university directing a DSO not to file with SEVIS. AB 49 reaches the K-12 agencies and carves out federal requirements, and SB 98 imposes notice requirements rather than silence.
I am not going to claim a violation has occurred, but what I am saying is that the state has spent eight years legislating steadily toward the line, a line defined by four words nobody has construed or interpreted, and the federal statute standing behind that line has one remedy so blunt it has never been used.
That is not a system anybody should be comfortable with. Congress had 30 years to take notice, and Arthur told it where to look nine years ago.
The September 15 final rule tacitly concedes the whole point.
By replacing duration of status admissions for foreign students with fixed-date admissions, DHS admits that a system dependent on school employees to tell ICE whether a foreign national is still lawfully here was never sound.
It has now fixed that dependency at the admission stage. The foreign student reporting dependency remains, it still relies on state employees, and it’s still backed by a statute that gives the government nothing to do about violations short of closing a university's doors to the world.
It’s time for Congress to fix the statute that governs certifications of schools to accept foreign students. Leave the compliant campuses alone. And stop pretending the states that will not tell us about their criminal aliens have somehow earned the right to keep handling foreign student visa paperwork on their own terms.