An international student at Oregon State University has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration after it revoked his legal status earlier this month.
Aaron Ortega Gonzalez is a Mexican citizen and a PhD student at Oregon State, where he’s been researching the impact of wildfires on ranchlands. Ortega Gonzalez has reportedly been given no reason why the federal government ended his legal status.
According to the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court of Oregon on Wednesday, officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement went into a government-controlled database of student visas on April 4 and terminated Ortega Gonzalez’s status.
Immigration officials wrote in the database: “individual identified in criminal records check and/or has had their VISA revoked,” the filing said.
According to the lawsuit, Oregon State University’s Offices of International Services emailed Ortega Gonzalez on April 8 alerting him to the change in his status. University officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The 32-year-old has not been detained, but was told that he is “expected to depart the United States immediately.” The lawsuit asks the court to reinstate Ortega Gonzalez’s status.
Ortega Gonzalez was born and raised in Mexico, where he obtained his undergraduate degree. He applied for and received a student visa in 2021. He received a master’s degree at a university in Texas before moving to Corvallis to pursue his doctorate.
Attorneys for Ortega Gonzalez say he has never committed a crime or a traffic violation. He’s never withdrawn from his studies — which can result in visa termination — nor has he “engaged in unauthorized employment.”
“Not only was Aaron unilaterally stripped of his status and denied due process rights, as it violates the law, the critical research he was working on has been halted,” Ortega Gonzalez’s attorneys said in a press release.
ICE officials declined to comment, citing the litigation.
Three legal teams are representing him: the ACLU of Oregon, the legal nonprofit Innovation Law Lab, and immigration law firm Nelson Smith LLP.
The move comes as the federal government continues to target international students across the United States by quashing their visas. That includes four students at the University of Oregon and two students at Portland State University.
Publicly, many of the federal governments’ moves have ostensibly aimed at ending antisemitism. On April 9, Homeland Security officials announced the agency has begun monitoring social media activity of people seeking “lawful permanent resident status,” as well as international students, for posts that “support antisemitic terrorism.”
Tiffany Camhi contributed to this report.
This story comes to you from the Northwest News Network, a collaboration between public media organizations in Oregon and Washington.
