A 25-year-old computer science student at West Virginia University set to graduate in a couple of weeks is fighting in federal court to remain in the United States.
“I am a good student from a good family, and I don’t deserve this,” Sajawal Ali Sohail, who goes by Ali, said in a news release distributed by the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia.
“All my family and I have wanted since day 1 is to do everything the right way, the legal way, and I just want to complete my degree here in the U.S.”
A notification that Sajawal Ali Sohail received earlier this month indicated that his digital record kept by federal officials to track international students was terminated for this reason: “OTHER – Individual identified in criminal records check and/or has had their VISA revoked.”
Sohail and his attorneys maintain in a federal lawsuit that he is not a criminal. Instead, they maintain, the story is more complicated: that he was briefly and wrongly arrested and then cleared of a fraud scheme where his family members were actually the victims.
“Mr. Sohail has been convicted of no crime– to the contrary, his family was the victim of a crime which resulted in legal action on their behalf in Pakistan, and for which all charges against Mr. Sohail were promptly dismissed,” wrote his attorney, Aubrey Sparks of ACLU West Virginia.
Sohail, whose family is from Pakistan, contends his Fifth Amendment and legal administrative rights have been violated. His lawyer is asking for a federal judge to issue a temporary restraining order followed by an injunction to have his status restored.
“Our client has been victimized three times now – once by a scammer, then again by police who incorrectly charged him with a crime, and now a third time by the Trump administration for citing that charge as grounds to endanger his legal status in the country,” Sparks said.
Sohail’s story is laid out in the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia.
For the past several years, Sohail has been studying in the United States on F-1 status, which refers to a non-immigrant visa allowing people to enter and study in the United States at an accredited higher education institution.
Toward the end of the fall 2022 semester, WVU police reached out to Sohail and asked him to come to the police station and he complied, although he did not know what it was about.
The offices there showed him a photograph and asked if he knew the person pictured. He said he did not, and the officers instructed him to ask his family.
The student called his family and returned to the police station on the following Monday to provide what information he could.
“An officer arrested Mr. Sohail on the spot, without listening to any of the information, charging him with identity theft, first as a misdemeanor and later as a felony,” according to the student’s filing in his federal case.
The same day, he went before a judge and was instructed to return with a lawyer. After Sohail was released, he spoke to his father.
“It became clear that their family was not the perpetrator of a crime—they were victims of one,” according to the student’s federal lawsuit.
Sahail’s father had been paying for his tuition at WVU but ran short of money to pay the fall 2022 tuition. A business acquaintance offered to front the Sohail family the funds to pay the tuition by the deadline, with the understanding that the family would pay him back on a payment plan, according to the filing.
The lender appeared to have paid the tuition as agreed, the filing indicates, and the Sohails began sending repayments as they had agreed.
The filing indicates the individual entrusted to make the payment was a scammer who used stolen information to make the payment.
It was only after the Sohails had transferred thousands of dollars to the lender that the original payment to the
university bounced, according to the filing. So the scammer made off with the Sohail family’s funds that they had ‘repaid’ – funds meant to support their son’s a education at WVU.
After the scam was discovered, the Sohail family paid the full tuition. The charges against Sohail were dismissed, and he was not subject to further charges.
Now, Sohail would be on track to graduate in May. But because of the termination of his account with the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System maintained by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, he has not been permitted to attend classes in person.
The lawsuit filed in his name contends these kinds of situations are happening all over the country. The ACLU of West Virginia is also supporting a lawsuit by a Marshall University graduate student who is being pressured to leave the country just weeks before graduation.
“These students have traveled far, studied hard, and paid significant tuition into the United States economy, whilst enriching the scholarship and culture of our academic institutions, only to be denied the credentials they worked so hard to achieve, for capricious and arbitrary reasons,” Sohail’s lawsuit states.
“The unlawful terminations are part of a clear policy and pattern/practice, whether written or not, perpetuated by Defendants to cancel the status of hundreds, if not thousands, of immigrant students nationwide, or, in the alternative, sow such chaos and confusion that F-1 students with otherwise legal status believe that they are required to self-deport.”