The Donald Trump administration has backpedalled on its promise to strip visas of students whose classes are moving entirely online for the new school year.
Many Guyanese student athletes in the USA were worried about their status and having to return to the 592 after Trump’s administration announced earlier this month that international students who would not attend in-person classes would have their visas rescinded and subsequently deported.
“Good sense prevailed in the end” said Coach Julian Edmonds who has five USA based students competing in Track and Field on the collegiate circuit.
Edmonds who coaches Andrea Foster at Clemson, Natricia Hooper
at Florida State, Claudrice McKoy at Texas Tech, Avon Samuels at St John’s University and Kenisha Phillips at Austin Peay State University was elated that the US government had the pullback.
Edmonds noted that Trump was ‘pulling a stunt’ designed to force colleges and universities into returning to onsite classes for the new school year amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
If the administration had gone ahead with its plan to annul visa privileges, more than one million international students would have been affected.
The announcement by the administration was met with several lawsuits, including from MIT and Harvard.
Seventeen states also filed their own lawsuits against the decision. A number of major corporations, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and the American Chamber of Commerce, also took legal action.
