A photo of the University of Iowa campus. (Main photo courtesy of the University of Iowa; form courtesy of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security)
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is seeking the dismissal of a lawsuit filed by University of Iowa students who fear they’ve been targeted for deportation.
The federal agency argues that it has complied with court orders in the case by reversing a decision in April to alter the students’ status within the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System — a move that could have paved the way for deportation.
By reversing course, the agency’s lawyers argue, Homeland Security has rendered the lawsuit moot. The plaintiffs, they argue in their motion to dismiss the case, “have obtained the relief they originally sought. There is nothing more for the court to do.”
In their motion, lawyers for Homeland Security acknowledge the judge in the case, when responding to a different motion, had previously ruled that “actions compelled by court order are not actions that moot a case.”
Attorneys for the students have yet to respond to the motion to dismiss. The students’ attorney, Katherine Melloy Goettel, declined to comment on the matter. A hearing in the case is scheduled for Aug. 27.
Judge has rejected prior requests from DHS
In April 2025, the three UI international students and one international-student graduate sued DHS for wrongful termination of their student status, which they alleged caused irreparable stress and anxiety due to fear of imminent seizure and deportation.
On May 15, 2025, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction requiring DHS to maintain the plaintiffs’ status as students in its Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) records. The judge also ordered DHS to add to the records a notation of active student status that would be backdated to the date the agency had terminated that status — ensuring that other entities wouldn’t act on the termination and attempt to deport the students on that basis.
On June 12, 2025, DHS filed a motion seeking to revise the injunction. The department argued that due to technological limitations with SEVIS records, the system did not allow the creation of written notations that would be visible to other users of the system, such as schools and employers, outside of DHS.
DHS asked that the court issue a ruling indicating it had fulfilled the requirements of the injunction, while also arguing the injunction was overbroad and amounted to a prohibition against any sort of prosecution for crimes the students might commit.
Noting that DHS had made no assertions as to what, if any, efforts had been made to remedy the claimed technological limitations within SEVIS, U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger denied DHS’ motion to revise her order.
With regard to DHS’ claim that the injunction bars future criminal prosecutions, Ebinger noted that her order does not apply to state, county, or local law enforcement acting separately from DHS and not at DHS’ instruction.
Also, she ruled, the injunction “prevents neither arrests nor the commencement of prosecutions. Rather, as to the plaintiffs — four individual people whom the court previously found to be likely to succeed on their claims of unfounded and harmful status record interference — the court’s order requires advance notice to the court as part of defendants’ due process efforts. The order does not prohibit law enforcement actions.”
DHS officials describe Student Criminal Alien Initiative
As part of their recent request for a dismissal of the lawsuit, attorneys for Homeland Security provided the court with a sworn statement from Akil Baldwin, the acting assistant director of the National Security Division of Homeland Security Investigations within the department.
In his statement, Baldwin said he oversees the Student Exchange Visitor Program “in support of ICE efforts to identify, disrupt and dismantle transnational criminal enterprises and terrorist organizations.” He said the four UI students’ criminal histories — which, according to the students’ attorney, are limited to misdemeanor-level offenses such as drunken driving — led to the revocation of their student visas.
The process, he said in his statement, began when Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, launched what he called the Student Criminal Alien Initiative.
As part of that initiative, he said, HSI obtained access to the federal criminal database maintained by the National Crime Information Center to determine “whether any nonimmigrant students had criminal records.”
HSI then sent its findings to the U.S. Department of State “to take action as it deemed appropriate,” Baldwin said. The Department of State then revoked “some nonimmigrant student visas with an NCIC record,” Baldwin stated.
Then, at the Department of State’s request, HSI terminated the SERVIS records of those students who now had no valid student visa. In April, amid a flurry of litigation related to its actions, Homeland Security reversed course and began restoring the students’ SEVIS records to “active” status.
During a District of Columbia court hearing in April, Homeland Security’s assistant director for national security, Andre Watson, discussed the agency’s Student Criminal Alien Initiative.
Watson testified as to how 10 to 20 ICE employees spent several weeks combing through the records of 1.3 million holders of student visas to determine whether any of them might have had some form of interaction with law enforcement, such as a traffic violation that was later dismissed.
An exasperated D.C. District Court Judge Ana C. Reyes asked Watson, “Are you telling me that with all of the cost cutting that we have going on right now — because apparently we’re spending too much money in the federal government doing things like, oh, I don’t know, funding cancer research, can’t afford to do that — that we had, not ‘we,’ but ‘someone,’ had 10 to 20 federal employees spend their time going name by name in a database to see what hits they got for 1.3 million people? Is that what happened? Yes or no.”
“Yes,” Watson replied. He explained that of the 1.3 million student names, less than half of 1%, or roughly 6,400 student names, were passed on to the State Department. The State Department then revoked visas to travel into the United States for 3,000 of those students, and then told Homeland Security to terminate those students’ status in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System.
After hearing from Watson, Judge Reyes cited what she called the federal government’s “utter lack of concern for human individuals who we have invited into our country and who have (made) communities richer by being students who have contributed to our colleges and who have paid our colleges.”
Iowa Capital Dispatch and the Nebraska Examiner are part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: [email protected].
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