Fellow UT students, 

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Students and Exchange Visitors Program, or SEVP, under the direction of the Trump Administration, has released new rules concerning nonimmigrant international students staying in the US this coming fall. Under these new rules, nonimmigrant students can only take a maximum of ONE online course, and the rest must be in person or hybrid. Students at universities with hybrid plans can take more than one class online, but their full course load cannot be online. If these conditions are not met, the student must leave the US and return home, transfer to an in-person university, or face deportation.

For many F1 students, this will severely impact or even ruin their degree plans, future job prospects, and/or intentions to seek permanent residency in the US. Many F1 students have signed leases for apartments they cannot back out of, and being at their university offers part-time employment, internship opportunities and academic opportunities they wouldn’t have at home or in other colleges. 

UT has recategorized a number of classes to create a mix of hybrid, online and in-person courses, but the current setup does not protect international students with fully online schedules, and doesn’t protect any F1 students in the event that UT will have to move to a fully online instruction model again.

This petition demands that UT Austin establish a system by which international students taking all online courses can have their schedules modified to include an in-person check-in component so their courses can be considered hybrid, and that UT maintain such a system even if all courses must be moved online. All Longhorns deserve to continue their studies regardless of nationality.