A federal judge has put the brakes on a Trump administration plan that would have sharply limited how long international students and journalists could stay in the United States, just a day before the new rules were due to kick in.

District Judge Dennis Saylor issued a preliminary injunction on Monday, freezing the Department of Homeland Security policy while a lawsuit brought by university, teacher, and journalist unions plays out. He didn’t rule on the actual merits of the case yet a further hearing is set for October 2 but his written opinion made clear he isn’t convinced the new rules can survive legal scrutiny.

The rules themselves would have marked a major departure from how student and journalist visas have worked for decades. Instead of being allowed to stay for however long their studies took, international students would have been capped at four years, after which they’d need to apply for an extension. Foreign journalists faced an even tighter squeeze just 240 days, roughly eight months, down from the current five-year allowance. Journalists from China would have had it toughest of all, limited to 90-day stints.

In his memo, Saylor pushed back hard on DHS’s reasoning. He pointed out that the existing system has brought in tens of millions of international students over the years, fueling scientific breakthroughs, medical advances, and real economic gains for the country. Rather than fix whatever problems existed, he wrote, the department chose to overhaul the entire system in a way that would choke off the number of students, researchers, professors, and journalists coming to the U.S.

What seemed to bother the judge most was the lack of any appeals process. Under the proposed rules, if DHS denied someone’s extension request, that was final no explanation required, no way to challenge it. Saylor didn’t mince words about where that could lead, warning that a single official could end someone’s academic or professional life in America “for no reason or any reason.” He was particularly blunt about the risk to journalists, suggesting it would be all too easy for reporters critical of the government or of DHS itself to find their visas quietly not renewed.

He also took aim at the administration’s stated justification. DHS had defended the crackdown on national security grounds, but Saylor called that argument nearly absurd, noting it rested on little more than a scattering of isolated anecdotes rather than solid evidence.

The visa fight is just one piece of a much larger immigration push by the Trump administration, which has also ramped up enforcement raids in major cities and tightened legal routes to citizenship. For context, the U.S. hosted more than 1.1 million international students during the 2023-24 school year more than any other nation in the world.

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