By SHANNON O. WELLS
With immigration, visa status and travel on many Pitt community members’ minds, given the flurry of recent White House directives, the Office of International Services’ (OIS) new Immigration Lounges give students, faculty, staff and their families opportunities to meet with OIS staff to discuss recent changes.
This outlet for conversation and open dialogue will continue into the summer months, said Delo Blough, director of Pitt’s Office of International Services.
“Within the last couple of months, we’ve created these Immigration Lounges that I know a lot of you have referred people to,” she said during a May 9 presentation to Senate Student Admissions, Aid and Affairs Committee (SAAA). “They have been wildly successful. Students and scholars both really like the opportunity to be able to just stop by and ask a question.”
Summer sessions will take place on Thursdays, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., in the OIS office at 708 William Pitt Union.
“Anyone can stop by. And when I say anyone, I really do mean anyone,” Blough said. “I’ve had people that have green cards but are concerned about the current circumstances, especially around travel. Feel free to come in. We can talk through all of the issues and try and help navigate what’s happening.”
In addition to the Immigration Lounges, OIS offers Zoom meetings for an hour and a half every Wednesday. “And that has gotten some traction …” she said. “We’ll continue that through the summer as well.”
Blough’s presentation on the OIS reviewed its support services and how it is making adjustments in a new political climate.
Blough, who came to Pitt almost six years ago now, has worked in the higher education, immigration and international fields for about 30 years. She served as an immigration attorney in Washington, D.C., providing asylum-based assistance with Latino communities.
“It’s been a great six years, and it has some challenges along the way,” she said. “And we’re hitting some challenges right now.”
OIS, she explained, is based on four teams, including administration, which comprises Blough and Associate Director Sarah Jones, a database management employee and an office manager who runs the front desk.
“I’d say about 80% of what we do, at least, is immigration,” she said. “We are the people who work with all of the different international visitors to campus … those who stay a long time: students, scholars that come in, researchers, faculty, staff, anyone that comes in.
“And we work with virtually every school and department across the University, bringing those folks in in a legal way to keep their work authorization and their student authorization appropriate.”
Engagement work includes offering cultural events for J-1 scholars to participate in, which Pitt is required to do to maintain the program.
“Because no one else is really responsible for that group around campus, OIS has taken that on, and we run what we call Experience America,” she said. “Throughout the year, we have lunches on cultural topics. We have field events. We go places. We see things around the area.”
Working with the Human Resources office, OIS offers workshops and training to build and enhance cultural competency among faculty and staff around campus.
“We do all of the emails and social media presence and all of that with all of the populations,” Blough noted — up to 4,500 students, including 760 alumni, offered practical training.
Students brought in on an F-1 visa, “which is the main student visa,” she explained, can stay in the U.S. for at least one year after graduating to get practical training in their field. As Pitt’s representative, OIS is responsible for the immigration records of those former students.
“So they are ours, and we continue to work with them for that entire time there in OPT (Optional Practical Training),” she said.
“Many of them are our J-1 scholars,” including short-term scholars, such as postdocs.
SEVIS monitoring
In the past year, the OIS has set up an attorney-referral system including a list of legal professionals in the area.
“Immigration is one of those fields where it doesn’t really matter where the attorney is located,” she explained, because it’s based on federal laws.
OIS has always offered students referrals to Pittsburgh-area attorneys, including consultations with two Pitt-affiliated lawyers, but faculty and staff referrals have increased.
“We use those (lawyers) carefully, because they are paid for by us, and we don’t want just anyone to go to them,” Blough said. “If there are nuances that we really can’t get into with them, then we’ve referred other people to those attorneys for those 20-minute consultations.”
The OIS is providing specialized support in the wake of six Pitt students whose Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) records were terminated this spring, but eventually were reinstated.
“We were hearing across the country that these terminations were happening,” she explained, noting that in many cases, neither the student, nor the school received any notification before SEVIS records were terminated.
“We still monitor several times a day. I monitor over the weekend, because we want to see if the government is taking that negative action. And if they do, then we notify the student immediately, because it’s imperative that they begin the work of talking with an attorney and figuring out how they’re going to respond to this negative action.”
Following numerous lawsuits, the government recently “took a step back and reversed all of the terminations back to active,” Blough said, although that appears to be changing again. “We are hearing reports from schools across the country that some of those records are being re-terminated … on the basis of visa revocations.”
The State Department has the authority to revoke visas when they feel it’s mandated or necessary, often based on criminal offenses, she explained. “And typically they have been for … where a person has a major offense, and it would preclude them from getting a visa in the first place.”
As Blough explained during a May 2 forum on international student concerns and resources, a visa is only needed to get into the U.S.
“It’s not needed once you’re here. So you can have a visa, it can expire, and as long as you’re keeping your underlying status going, you’re fine,” she said. “ … Now (the White House) is revoking visas, and then, based on the visa revocation, they’re also beginning to terminate SEVIS records.
“And there’s a lot of talk in the court cases about what that really means.”
Although Pitt has not had any new or re-terminations since the six briefly terminated students were reactivated, Blough noted that one student was informed that his visa was revoked.
“I don’t have any idea of how they’re making decisions about what they will now terminate and what they want,” she said. “It’s just anyone’s guess.”
Travel concerns
Blough said while she’s hopeful that the many pending nationwide lawsuits will bring “some relief and some clarification to what’s happening, student travel remains a “real, huge concern.”
“That’s what we’ve spent most of our time in our immigration lounges talking about over the last couple of months,” she said. “I suspect that we’ll have fewer and fewer of those, because people have either decided to travel or not to travel. … As the summer rolls on, if people still have questions, we’ll continue to answer them.”
Responding to an SAAA committee member’s question regarding travel and citizenship status, Blough said despite hearing about U.S. citizens having difficulty re-entering the country, she is “trying to have a balanced attitude about this.”
“We’re hearing about all of the negatives right now. We are not hearing about the thousands of people who come into the country every day with no trouble, and that is happening,” she noted. “We know of non-citizens coming in. We know of citizens coming in.
“I know that this administration has talked about extreme vetting, both at the consulates and at the airports. My sense is that there are people and issues that they are targeting. And there’s never a guarantee when you’re coming and going that you’re not going to be questioned more thoroughly than other times or other people.
“But if you’re a U.S. citizen, you certainly have the right to come into the country, no matter what,” she added. “If I were traveling, I wouldn’t worry about it. … I try and keep those things in perspective.”
Blough said although publicly expressed pro-Palestinian leanings and controversial social media posts “might be cause for concern, there’s no way they can look at everybody’s social media as you’re coming into the airport. … My sense is that it’s probably only if you are targeted somehow ahead of time that they’ll take the time.”
Students’ well-being
Another question concerned available student mental health services. Blough said Pitt’s Counseling Center could best address this, but noted that OIS has an embedded counselor, Diana Ramirez, staff clinician in the Division of Student Affairs, in the office at least one day a week.
“We basically refer students to the Counseling Center or directly to Diana,” she said.
As far as students forced to leave the U.S. before finishing their degree, Blough said remote options for classes are possible.
“It really depends on what program you’re in and where you’re at in your program, how your school feels, and what they’re able to accommodate or not,” she said, noting that trade compliance and taxes come into play. “So unfortunately, it’s not even just between the school and the student. It’s going to have other implications.
“Everybody that I’ve talked with around campus wants to make sure that a student that started can finish, and I know that efforts will be made to do that,” she added. “I just can’t guarantee that every student would be able to if they would not be able to come back …
“My concern is far more on the incoming side that we’ll begin to see fewer and fewer that are coming into the U.S. for school,” Blough said. “Students start here. Understandably, they want to finish.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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