Xiaotian Liu, an international graduate student at Dartmouth College, has decided to drop a lawsuit against the Trump administration after the government reinstated his legal status.
One of his lawyers, Gilles Bissonnette from the New Hampshire ACLU, said Liu is now back to working and studying.
“Mr. Liu is very pleased with this settlement. So you can now go about doing what he loves to do, which is studying computer science,” Bissonnette said.
Liu was one of the first students to sue the Trump administration in early April after his status had been revoked. His case was part of a trend of nearly 2,000 students in the country who were affected by this change – including other students at Southern New Hampshire University, the University of New Hampshire, Dartmouth College, and Rivier University.
The reasons for initially revoking Liu's status are still unclear as lawyers for the government and the Department of Homeland Security have not responded to multiple requests for comment from NHPR.
The end of this case concludes a confusing set of circumstances that the federal judge assigned to the case called “a bit Kafkaesque.” Days after Liu filed his initial complaint, Judge Samantha Elliott granted a temporary restraining order. Elliot eventually granted a preliminary injunction in late April. While the government challenged this decision, the Trump administration had already reversed course and announced it would reinstate records for international students who still had their visas.
Several of Liu’s lawyers said that the preliminary injunction in this lawsuit was one of the reasons that the government decided to backtrack the change.
“We all feel so grateful that we were able to obtain a positive resolution for him, a resolution that ended up, it seems, having an effect nationally,” said Bissonnette.
