A federal judge in Boston has blocked the Department of Homeland Security from enforcing a new rule that would cap most international student visas at four years and foreign journalist visas at 240 days, ruling that the department’s own justification for the limits “borders on the absurd.”
US District Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV, a George W. Bush appointee on the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, issued a preliminary injunction on September 14 in Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration v. Department of Homeland Security. He found the rule likely violates the Administrative Procedure Act because DHS “failed to conduct any reasoned calculation of the benefits and costs,” never seriously weighed alternatives, and did not meaningfully respond to public comments before finalizing it.
The Department of Homeland Security first proposed the time limits in August 2025 and finalized them in July 2026, ending the decades-old practice of admitting international students, exchange visitors, and foreign media representatives for the “duration of status” needed to finish their programs. Under the final rule, most students and exchange visitors on F and J visas would instead be admitted for a fixed period of up to four years, while foreign journalists on I visas would be capped at 240 days, in most cases with no guaranteed path to an extension.
DHS’s own regulatory analysis put the rule’s overall compliance costs at $443.1 million USD to $448.6 million USD, including $119.9 million USD to $125.1 million USD borne by parties inside the United States. Saylor noted that the government separately acknowledged, in litigation, that compliance costs alone would likely exceed $250 million USD in the rule’s first year — and wrote that “the real expected costs go far beyond” even that figure, since the estimate ignores how many graduate programs and post-graduation practical-training periods already run longer than four years.
The order cites enrollment figures from four of the state’s research universities to make the point concrete: more than 40% of MIT‘s graduate students (and 11.6% of its undergraduates), 38% of Harvard‘s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 56.6% of Northeastern University‘s graduate students, and 28.4% of Boston University‘s students are international.
International students, most of whom earn degrees in science, technology, engineering, or math, account for roughly a quarter of the country’s billion-dollar startups and are disproportionately represented among US patent holders and Nobel laureates, according to research cited in the ruling. A study covering 1990 to 2010, cited by the plaintiffs, found that growth in foreign STEM workers explained between 30% and 50% of all aggregate US productivity growth over that period.
The four-year cap does not track how long a degree actually takes to finish. Under the rule, an extension beyond four years is entirely discretionary and unappealable, even within DHS itself. Saylor wrote that “an international student who is one credit short of graduating could be required to leave the United States without a degree and without any recourse,” a level of uncertainty he said carries “an obvious deterrent effect on student enrollment.”
A 2025 survey by the Institute for Progress found that 49% of current international students said they would not have enrolled under the new policy, and 16% of prospective students said they would be less likely to enroll if it takes effect. The plaintiffs estimated that even a conservative 10% drop in international enrollment would cost the US economy tens of billions of dollars USD a year. George Mason University economist Michael Clemens projected the annual loss could reach as much as $145 billion USD within a decade.
DHS defended the rule as a national-security and anti-fraud measure, but Saylor found that rationale “borders on the absurd.” The agency’s own record cited only a handful of anecdotes to justify the caps: three cases of Chinese students photographing US military installations, one visa overstay, and one Russian intelligence operative who entered the country on a student visa obtained with a fraudulent Brazilian identity. Saylor wrote that none of those incidents would have been prevented by a four-year limit, noting that a foreign student “who wishes to photograph military bases could do so during a four-year period — or, indeed, could do so on a six-month B-1 tourist visa.”
“The government’s contention that the rule is necessary to safeguard national security borders on the absurd.”
US District Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV
The 240-day cap on I visas drew a separate set of objections from the journalism groups among the plaintiffs, including the NewsGuild-CWA. Commenters warned that unrenewable, discretionary visa periods could let DHS officials effectively deny credentials to foreign correspondents whose coverage the government dislikes. Saylor agreed the “possibilities for abuse are rampant,” writing there is an “obvious likelihood” that visas for journalists critical of DHS officials specifically “will not be renewed.” DHS responded only that it “does not intend for the rule to chill speech, encourage censorship, or result in viewpoint discrimination” and said it lacked data to quantify any chilling effect — a response Saylor treated as no response at all.
Saylor was careful to say he was not ruling on the wisdom of the policy itself, only on whether DHS followed the law in adopting it. But he wrote that the rule’s weak connection to its stated goals “raises legitimate questions as to whether its real purpose is not to safeguard national security and protect our borders, but to achieve other, undisclosed, goals,” including “asserting greater government control over academic institutions and the press.”
The preliminary injunction blocks DHS from enforcing the fixed time periods while the underlying lawsuit continues in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts. The plaintiffs are the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, NAFSA: Association of International Educators, the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts, the American Federation of Teachers together with its Graduate Labor Organization (AFT Local 6516), the NewsGuild-CWA, and the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America together with UAW Local 2322.
(Photo: Image by kjsmit2 from Pixabay)