On the Arbitrary and Capricious Treatment of International Students: A Letter to Congressman Sam Graves

April 28, 2025

Congressman Sam Graves

1135 Longworth HOB

Washington, D.C.  20515

Congressman Sam Graves:

I am writing today to express my frustration with the arbitrary and capricious treatment—by the government of the United States of America, by the Trump Administration, by the Department of Homeland Security, by Immigration and Customs Enforcement—of the students at Northwest Missouri State University.

I am a member of the faculty at Northwest. I’ve taught here since 2008. And I am writing today, of course, as a citizen, not as a representative of my university. Let me underline that point, because it’s probably important (and I’m sure my employer would want me to underline it): I am writing as a citizen, not as a university official or spokesperson.

I would guess my university president, the Northwest Leadership Team, and the Northwest Board of Regents might discourage me from writing this letter at all.

They may think it’s better to stay quiet, to find the nearest patch of sand in which to bury our heads and to hope the “storm”—caused by the chaotic and incompetent and one-agency-doesn’t-know-what-the-others-are-doing and anti-university and anti-immigrant and anti-international-student executive branch—soon passes.

I disagree.

I don’t believe that Northwest Missouri State will be stronger next year than it was this year if we allow external threats to remain unnamed and unconfronted.

And I don’t know that the storm is going to soon pass.

The federal government disrupted the spring 2025 for many Bearcats—and, so, yes, I have a grievance. I think the federal government’s treatment of our students is wrong.

So, I’m writing today in the spirit of the nation’s founding, I suppose, and the “redress of grievances” promise of the First Amendment.

I am writing today, in part, to ask for you to apologize on behalf of the federal government for what’s been recently done to our international students.

I’d like you to apologize for making them afraid. I’d like you to apologize for interrupting their spring 2025 with the threatening clouds of deportation and academic stoppage. I’d like you to apologize for changing their legal status with no rationale. I’d like you to apologize for inducing some of them to flee the country in fear of further federal action such as confinement or deportation.

These students are our invited guests. I’d like you to apologize for making the United States of America an inhospitable and ungracious host.

And then I’d like you to use your position in Congress to metaphorically slap the wrists—or more, if you can—of the executive branch agencies that caused Northwest’s students such inexplicable and unnecessary harm.

On April 11, 2025, just two weeks ago, President Lance Tatum informed the campus community that five currently enrolled degree-seeking students and 38 optional practical training students had been subjected to the arbitrary and capricious action of the Department of Homeland Security. (To be clear, “arbitrary and capricious action” are my words, not President Tatum’s.) In particular, these 43 Bearcats had their SEVIS records terminated.

Of course, these visa revocations and SEVIS record terminations were a marked departure from the government’s past practice.

And Northwest was not alone.

Across the nation, an avalanche of lawsuits, both by individuals and by classes of affected students, quickly followed the government’s unexplained and abrupt policy shift.

I have read a few of the resulting TROs that have been issued in the past few weeks by federal judges. I’m an English professor, not a lawyer, but my reading of these restraining orders, which have kept many of the students lawfully in the country and able to return to their classes and their degree programs, demonstrates that these were not, to put it generously, close calls.

The federal government obviously had changed the rules in the middle of the game.

And that, as you know, is not allowed under the law.

Interestingly, the TROs that were not granted—and there were a few, early on—were not granted because of a reason that flew in the face of why ICE had done what they’d done in the first place. The Department of Justice, in hearings and legal filings, had argued that the impacted students were not harmed because they were not required to leave the country.

The Department of Justice, in a few instances, argued that terminating these students’ SEVIS records was simply “housekeeping” and didn’t actually reflect a change in the students’ ability to remain lawfully in the country or continue with their academic courses and degree programs.

But the federal government did not make this argument consistently.

In other legal filings and hearings, Department of Justice lawyers argued that the affected international students were, in fact, “accruing unlawful time” in the country, after their SEVIS record terminations. The government’s position was that these students weren’t harmed because they could simply transfer to universities in their home countries after packing up and leaving the U.S. in the middle of the spring 2025 term.

Many universities, including ours, did not understand the government’s behavior as “housekeeping.” We viewed it, as nearly every university in the country did, and as nearly every news report indicated, as the federal government encouraging students to drop out—or maybe encouraging the universities to expel them—and to then flee the country before ICE agents arrived at their doors or confronted them, zip-ties at the ready, their faces masked, perhaps wearing backpacks (to blend in), on their walk to class.

I’d like you to apologize for making them afraid.

According to the Administrative Procedure Act, the executive agencies of the federal government can, of course, depart from past practice (new administration, new priorities, etc.), as long as they provide their policy reasoning to the public and follow their own rulemaking processes. The APA also protects the public from “arbitrary and capricious” applications of federal law.

In short, yes, Trump can be a different president than Biden.

But, if the rules are going to be dramatically changed by a new president (and still, somehow, conform to the written law), and if the public has come to rely on the past interpretations of the law, the new president’s secretaries and undersecretaries have to commit these new interpretations to writing. They have to provide notice. They have to provide reasons. And they have to provide reasons that consider what effects—such as interruption of academic progress, such as loss of revenue for places like Northwest Missouri State University—the new interpretation will have on people.

The Trump Administration, of course, didn’t do that.

We relied on our understanding of applicable immigration law and student-visitor policies when we admitted these students.

If the Department of Homeland Security abides by the Administrative Procedure Act, it cannot depart dramatically from past practice (i.e. terminate SEVIS records in the middle of an academic term, which has never been done before under current immigration law) without giving the public, including the affected students and their host universities, a head’s up in writing and without providing a policy rationale that considers “reliance interests,” among other things.

The government cannot change the rules in the middle of the game.

It’s disruptive to the universities. It’s obviously massively disruptive to the affected students.

I was pleased to see that one of the federal judges (in Georgia) who issued a class-action TRO last week discussed in her order how the federal government’s actions had harmed the students. In particular, the judge singled out the harm caused by being plucked from your classes in the middle of an academic term: “The loss of timely academic progress alone is sufficient to establish irreparable harm.”

The federal judges that have issued many of these TROs have relied heavily on John Roberts’s majority opinion in Department of Homeland Security vs. Regents of the University of California (2020) and its articulation of the “arbitrary and capricious” standard.

I’ve read that, too, recently. I would encourage you to read it, if you haven’t, or to read it again, if it’s been a few years.

The Trump Administration, in the first two weeks of April, started to randomly, it seems, change the rules in the middle of the game. Many students were not given any reason for why their status had been changed in SEVIS. Some wondered if perhaps they’d been targeted because of an encounter with law enforcement. One student at a university in Utah believed he was perhaps targeted because he’d been the supervising adult at a Christian youth group fishing trip, and the group had been told by a park ranger that they’d caught a few too many fish.

The law allows visa revocations whenever visiting students commit violent felonies. But it does not allow the government to terminate students’ F1 visas, or F1 status to remain lawfully in the country, for over-fishing citations (those charges were dropped) or for getting on a bus that the bus driver says isn’t going anywhere. That was another one. Also dropped. Oh, brother.

Could you make these up, Congressman? Could you invent such ridiculous, obviously unlawful reasons for the federal government to encourage self-deportation—and implicitly threaten worse—of our tuition-paying students in the middle of an academic term?

(By the way, when I was in college at Mizzou, I received a citation from the city of Columbia for a noise violation. I admit it: My roommates and I had been playing Wilco’s “Candyfloss,” from the Summerteeth album, too loudly on a Friday night. Entirely my fault: I really like that song to be played loud. I went to court on a Saturday morning a few weeks later, and my roommates and I pooled our money for the $200 fine. AND IT DIDN’T DISRUPT MY ACADEMIC CAREER AT ALL. I WASN’T, YEARS LATER, ASKED TO LEAVE THE UNITED STATES OVER IT. NOR HAS IT PREVENTED ME FROM VISITING IRELAND, CANADA, OR THE CZECH REPUBLIC.)

For weeks, now, international students at Northwest Missouri State and at universities all over the country have been living in fear.

Some universities have been telling students to scrub their social media of mentions of anything that might conceivably be viewed, by the capricious and arbitrary federal government, as controversial. Don’t talk about Gaza. Don’t talk about DEI. Don’t talk about gender identity. Don’t talk about anything, don’t post anything, don’t write anything that isn’t carefully aligned with the Republican Party of the United States.

How exhausting.

How utterly anti-academic. How utterly anti-American.

I’m guessing some students have been cautioned not to write or publish any op-eds.

Because, as you likely know quite well, Congressman, the federal government has been targeting international students more broadly. Some are being arrested on the street outside their apartments. Some are being detained when they go in for a routine meeting to discuss their applications for their green cards.

Rümeysa Öztürk’s only offense, it seems, was co-authoring an op-ed in her student newspaper at Tufts. (I’ve read it, by the way. It would have received an A if she or her co-authors had been in my Composition II class.) She’s still being detained, after the government took her from Massachusetts to New Hampshire and Vermont and then, finally, strangely, bizarrely, wrongly, to Louisiana—so that it would be more difficult for her family and friends and lawyers to find her, so that it would be easier for the government to keep her locked up for as long as possible.

Why haven’t you called for the executive branch to release her?

Why haven’t you called on the executive branch to release Mahmoud Khalil?

Why haven’t you come out and said publicly that the U.S. government should not be detaining and deporting anyone because of their protected speech?

Some universities have been telling their international students not to travel outside of the country; these universities fear that, once their students board their flights, the federal government may simply revoke visas, which is the students’ ticket back in.

Some universities are attempting to secure on- or off-campus housing for students this summer so that they remain in the United States, maybe, until they finish their degrees.

How exhausting.

How exhaustingly anti-American.

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On Friday, April 25, 2025, the Trump Administration announced in federal court that it was undoing its 1,000+ arbitrary and capricious SEVIS record terminations.

According to the Department of Justice lawyer who made the announcement in a federal court on Friday: “ICE is developing a policy that will provide a framework for SEVIS record terminations. Until such a policy is issued, the SEVIS records for plaintiff(s) in this case (and other similarly situated plaintiffs) will remain active or shall be reactivated if not currently active, and ICE will not modify the record solely based on the NCIC finding that resulted in the recent SEVIS record termination.”

So, this is wonderful news for our affected students!

But the bad news, of course, is that the Department of Homeland Security, after the DOJ released its statement on suspending their unlawful SEVIS record terminations, issued its own statement: “We have not reversed course on a single visa revocation. What we did is restore SEVIS access for people who had not had their visa revoked.”

Crazy confusing, right?

Seems like the left hand still doesn’t know what the right hand is doing?

Seems like the LAWYERS who work for the government cannot defend an unlawful policy, but the look-ma-I-got-a-real-job Trump Administration officials who work in Homeland Security really, really, really want to keep doing unlawful stuff?

Seems like the federal government is taking a temporary pause in disrupting our students’ lives and academic careers until they get it worked out on paper in a way that will, undoubtedly, give them more runway to unlawfully and arbitrarily and capriciously scare every international student while also detaining some and deporting some?

Would you encourage any international students to come to Northwest right now?

Would you look a parent from China or India in the eye and say, “Don’t worry. Your son or daughter will not be targeted by the federal government for anything that they write. They won’t be locked up in a detention center for writing an op-ed in the student newspaper. They won’t be told, by their universities, ‘Maybe it is best if you left the country right now,’ in the middle of an academic term, in the middle of their apartment lease, in the middle of their lives”?

The federal government has not been following the law when it comes to our international students. The DOJ knew it couldn’t keep defending unlawful “final decisions” by ICE. They couldn’t keep explaining the inexplicable. They knew there wasn’t a legally defensible “process” they could offer up in court.

The Trump Administration’s actions have already and maybe irrevocably harmed our students.

And if you harm our students, you are harming us.

If you don’t remember anything else I say in this letter, please remember this: If you harm our students, you are harming us.

I recognize that the harm to our students, and to us, has been done. And maybe there’s not much that can be done for the students, if any, that have already left Northwest or their post-Northwest jobs and the United States.

But I’m writing you today because I’m worried about long-term implications of the federal government’s hostile posture toward international students. I’m worried about our international enrollment in 2025-2026 and beyond.

I’m worried that, if we don’t express our grievance, if we don’t get some reasonable members of Congress (hi, buddy!) on our side and willing to fight for the interests of the students and faculty and staff at Northwest Missouri State University, we will cease to have a university . . . in the truest sense.

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I teach writing, and so I have a decent window onto how at least some Northwest students are feeling about the issues affecting them.

When Northwest shuttered our Office of Diversity and Inclusion earlier this year, my Composition II students had recently started work on an op-ed assignment.

There was a small protest on campus when the president at Northwest closed the Office of Diversity and Inclusion. The Northwest Missourian devoted an issue of the student newspaper to covering the story.

But the students in my classes did not seem to want to talk about it. Of course, I didn’t want to force them to talk about it. I asked if anybody wanted to talk about it, and they said no, not really, and so we moved on. Simple enough.

When I read their op-ed drafts a few days later, though, I saw that the students maybe didn’t feel comfortable speaking extemporaneously about the closure of the ODI, but they definitely had a whole lot to say.

(Many students, to be sure, wrote about parking on campus. That was, as it always is, the most popular topic.)

Many students wrote about the closure of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion. No student wrote that closing the Office of Diversity and Inclusion was a good thing. No one said it made Northwest a better place. No one wrote that it made them feel more welcome and included on campus.

One student wrote, “I truly believe DEI is his code word for ‘Black’ people, and the continual foolery insinuating DEI had something to do with the two major plane crashes this week is sickening, insensitive, and baloney.” The “his” in that student’s essay refers, you probably guessed, to President Trump.

The notion of “code” came up a lot in these students’ essays. The overwhelming sentiment expressed in the op-eds: Saying you’re getting rid of “diversity” initiatives and programs has become code for “We are no longer welcoming and inclusive of people of all races and ethnicities and people whose sexual orientation and gender identity isn’t heterosexual and cisgender.”

That may not be the message that President Tatum intended to send when he announced the closing of the ODI at Northwest. Perhaps that’s not the message that the “state leaders” that pressured us into closing the ODI wanted to send, either. But that is the message that was received. That was the message that was perceived.

By the time the federal government disrupted the spring term for some of Northwest’s international students, my composition classes had moved on to other assignments. So, I don’t have quite the ability I had with the closure of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion to take their temperature.

But I can take my own.

Here’s what I’m thinking:

We have a rule in the student handbook at Northwest about “disrupting the living/learning environment.” Students cannot engage in behavior that disrupts the learning environment. Sometimes, if a student is routinely or egregiously disruptive of the learning environment, we take action. The student might be disciplined. The student might be expelled.

The federal government, in the spring of 2025—so, yes, since the inauguration of President Trump—has been disrupting the learning environment at Northwest.

If we were to conduct an honest and thorough S.W.O.T. analysis at Northwest, wouldn’t ICE, and maybe the executive branch of the federal government more broadly, likely be high on our list of threats?

This is probably the most meaningful spot on our campus tour:

That’s Northwest’s International Plaza.

We have a tradition. Students from the various countries represented here will raise their flag during Homecoming.

Why is it one of the most meaningful spots on the campus tour? Because it isn’t only picturesque (check out that red brick!); it’s also a physical embodiment of what we value.

Here’s another spot on the tour that helps to express what we value, the archway above the main doorway of the Administration Building:

Universities have an obligation to the truth. Our telos connects truth with freedom.

Our students come here—from, yes, places all across the globe—to learn. People like me are here to learn, I suppose, but mainly we’re here to teach, which is another way of saying that we act as guides to our students’ learning. I’m expected to seek the truth in my research, in my writing. I’m expected to help my students explore the truth in the courses I teach.

We seek and explore that truth through art, through argument. We sometimes perform experiments whose outcomes we’re somewhat sure about—to learn the moves. We sometimes perform experiments whose outcomes are entirely unknown. We write. We revise. We stumble. We ask questions. We debate. We make two plans and compare them. We push past our first answer in search of a truer second.

On and on, on repeat: We seek the truth.

We seek the truth in large ways and small.

We seek the truth, as teachers and students, so that we might experience a deeper, more lasting, kind of freedom.

If we didn’t do that, we would just be . . . a lonely outpost in the northwestern corner of the state—that also happens to be the Missouri State Arboretum?

If we didn’t explore and seek the truth, if we didn’t attempt to forge, again and again, that connection between truth and freedom, we wouldn’t be a university. Or we wouldn’t be a university that anyone should care about and fight for.

And having faculty and staff and students from Missouri and Alabama and Texas and California and Spain and Azerbaijan and Columbia and Ukraine and India is an important ingredient in our ability to seek and explore and better understand the truth.

Other ingredients are important, too.

We wouldn’t be a university anyone should care about and fight for if we didn’t have classrooms and a library.

We wouldn’t be able to train our computer scientists as well as we do if we didn’t have electricity in every academic building and laptops in every backpack.

We wouldn’t be much of a university if, instead of providing students access to faculty with advanced degrees and a dedication to the university mission, we just made students watch YouTube all day, pay us $1,000 per week for the privilege, and learn what they could from Mark Rober (from whom they might learn some) and Mr. Beast (from whom they’d likely learn less).

We wouldn’t be much of a university if every faculty member and every student grew up in St. Joseph, Missouri, in the 1980s, and often, in their younger days, listened to Wilco too loud, and have never broken a bone, and have never, since the projector conked out halfway through the screening they attended in 1984, seen the end of The NeverEnding Story.

We wouldn’t be the halfway decent place to live and learn and work that we are if we didn’t believe that we owe it to every Bearcat to at least try to live up to the promise of the International Plaza and the words on the archway above the door.

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Remember what Ronald Reagan said in his farewell speech from the Oval Office? I’ll remind you:

“We the People” tell the Government what to do; it doesn't tell us. “We the People” are the driver; the Government is the car. And we decide where it should go, and by what route, and how fast. Almost all the world’s constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which “We the People” tell the Government what it is allowed to do. “We the People” are free.

And do you remember what he said in his last ever speech as the U.S. President? I’ll remind you:

We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.

Ronald Reagan was the first president I remember. (I was born in 1980, when Jimmy Carter was finishing up his term.) Later, the more I learned about him, the more I came to disagree with many of his political ideas. But, as a child, he mainly brought forth similar feelings in me as my grandparents did. He sort of reminded me of my Grandma Harrington (weirdly enough), and I always sort of loved it when he came on TV. I mainly thought, as a child, that his voice was reassuring. I always liked his voice.

And it’s truly, truly lovely what he says in those two speeches. And right. He’s also right.

We the People are driving the car. So, please, don’t dismiss me. Don’t throw this letter in the trash. I am your constituent, which means that, yes, in a way, I am your boss.

You don’t have to agree with me 100 hundred percent, but you must at least listen to me, as you would, I would hope, listen to your boss.

If I’m wrong about anything I’ve said in my letter, feel free to tell me. I’m happy to learn. I can live with correction.

But I cannot abide dismissal.

Because that would mean that Reagan was fundamentally wrong—and our country isn’t the country I thought I knew.

And President Reagan’s also right about our visiting students and immigrants.

Fulfilling our telos at Northwest requires “energy” and “new ideas.” It requires us to think through what we know, admit to what we don’t, and to sometimes challenge the status quo. It requires us to conduct some experiments for which we don’t know the outcome.

We have to write. We have to revise. We have to debate. We have to argue.

We have to learn.

More than anything, we have to learn.

And to do that . . . we need all of the ingredients. We need books in the library. We need electricity to power those computers.

And we need students and staff and faculty that are welcomed from all corners of the globe.

We need them.

They’re Bearcats.

And there really isn’t any Northwest without the Bearcats.

Northwest, like America itself, is stronger because of its international student population. We are a better university because we attract domestically born, happen-to-be-U.S.-citizen faculty and staff and students as well as students and faculty and staff that were not born in the United States of America.

Notice how Reagan, in that last speech, equates “people” with “strength”?

My students get it: If you say you’re against “diversity,” what that really means, what the code decoded reveals, is that you are against . . . diverse people.

If you’re terminating the SEVIS registrations, without notice, without rationale, without following the letter and the spirit of the laws of this nation, you are, quite obviously, against the people who have come to the United States as visiting students.

That’s wrong.

And it makes Northwest a worse place to live and work and learn.

If you are against our international students at Northwest, Congressman, then you are, quite frankly, against me.

And I’m your boss.

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But maybe I’m a cool boss. Let’s try that.

Let’s work together.

I don’t want Northwest to be weaker next year and the year after. I want it to be stronger.

If you don’t want Northwest Missouri State University to be weaker next year and the year after, I would ask you to . . . stand up and speak up.

Join me. Let’s figure out some ways to protect our international students.

Join us in protecting Bearcats from arbitrary and capricious treatment by the federal government.

I would like you to call or write President Tatum and the Northwest Board of Regents to express your commitment to our university mission, which is to help our students learn and, in that way, to enable their success.

If our students are not in class, in spring 2025 or at anytime in the future, because the federal government’s doing its arbitrary and capricious mischief to discourage visitors to our country . . . well, then Northwest can’t help but fail in our mission.

Help us not to fail, Congressman Graves.

In order to fulfill our university mission, we must neutralize the threat that, over the past couple of months, has been showing us its teeth and (flailing) arms: the executive branch of the federal government.

Are you willing to fight alongside us? We could really use your help.

Are you willing to stand beside us, in solidarity, as we fight for our students to come here, to raise their flag at the International Plaza during Homecoming, and to stay here, at the very least, as we promised them, until they finish their degree?

Are you willing to encourage Northwest’s leadership to say, out loud and unafraid: We value our students’ learning and their freedom to pursue and to understand the truth, here with us, as Bearcats, above pretty much anything else?

Are you willing to tell your colleagues in the executive branch to stop? Are you willing to write a letter or make a phone call? Are you willing to quote President Reagan to whomever you can get on the phone at ICE?

Are you willing to agree with me, and our former president, that our “people” are our “strength”?

And that both the big country and the little university in Maryville, Missouri, are a whole lot better when we invite those people from “every country and every corner of the world” and then treat them with respect and dignity and fairness?

Are you willing to agree with me that we should, at the very least, strive to be better hosts for our visitors, and that we should strive, as President Ronald Reagan encourages us, to keep our doors open?

Best wishes, 

Richard Sonnenmoser

Maryville, Missouri