BOSTON — U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV on Sept. 14, 2026 postponed the effective date of a Department of Homeland Security Final Rule that would have ended decades-old “duration of status” admissions for international students and exchange visitors and capped foreign-press visas — a day before the rule was set to take effect Sept. 15, according to the court’s memorandum and order in Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration v. (1:26-cv-13799-FDS).

The Final Rule, published at 91 Fed. Reg. 44976 (July 17, 2026), would replace duration-of-status — used for F students since 1978 and for J exchange visitors since 1985 — with fixed admission periods: F and J visas capped at four years, and I visas for foreign press capped at 240 days. Longer stays would require Form I-539 extension-of-stay requests decided in DHS’s discretion. Roughly 1.6 million people presently hold F visas and about 500,000 hold J visas, Saylor wrote.

Plaintiffs include 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, AFT Local 6516, The NewsGuild-CWA, the UAW, and UAW Local 2322.

Saylor granted APA § 705 relief postponing the rule’s effective date and denied vacatur, summary judgment, and other relief without prejudice to renewal. He found plaintiffs likely to succeed on the merits, citing “exceptionally weak” government rationales and writing that the national-security justification “borders on the absurd” and rests almost entirely on a small handful of anecdotes the new rule would not prevent or mitigate. The Guardian reported the same ruling and DHS counsel’s criticism of the stay.

For nearly half a century, duration-of-status let nonimmigrants remain while pursuing a full course of study or authorized practical training — a system Saylor said enabled tens of millions of students and researchers and “groundbreaking research,” economic growth, and other benefits “often on a vast scale.” Ending that framework by agency fiat without a reasoned explanation is exactly the kind of arbitrary power the Administrative Procedure Act was written to cabin: agencies must examine the data, engage alternatives, and connect facts to the choice made — not swap a half-century status quo for fixed clocks and discretionary I-539 bottlenecks on anecdotal national-security vibes.

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