Photo courtesy of MIT

The federal government agreed to rescind controversial guidelines that would have barred international students from staying in the United States if they took online-only course loads in the fall.

Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology filed a lawsuit in an attempt to block the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement regulations released July 6 and during a hearing on Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Allison Burroughs said the two parties had reached an agreement prior to convening. The federal government will revert back to guidelines issued in early March allowing international students to remain in the country for online instruction during the duration of the COVID-19 public health emergency.

The sweeping decision threatened to dramatically cut the number of foreign students at area universities, with uncertain implications for the finances of those schools and for providers of off-campus student housing. City of Boston figures show nearly 43 percent of the city’s graduate and undergraduate students live in private, off-campus accommodations that are not their family homes.

After facing harsh pushback from higher education leaders across the country, the Trump administration reversed course allowing hundreds of thousands of international students to continue studies in the United States amid a worsening pandemic. Colleges and universities across the country, including Brown University and Northeastern University, filed amicus briefs in support of Harvard and MIT’s lawsuit against the guidelines.

The hearing Tuesday lasted only a few minutes with Judge Burroughs immediately announcing the agreement. Under the guidelines, international students who were only offered remote courses for the fall semester would have had to either leave the country or take “alternative steps” like transferring, taking a medical leave or reducing course loads.

The State Department did not plan to issue visas to students enrolled in colleges or universities with only-online course loads. Those students would have been prohibited from entering the country and could have faced deportation if they remained in the U.S. Any deportation order typically also bars the subject from returning to the country for between five years and for the remainder of their life.

William Lee of Winter Hale represented both schools during Tuesday’s hearing.

Attorney General Maura Healey also filed lawsuit Monday arguing that the ICE guidelines violated a part of federal law governing how federal agencies promulgate and issue regulations. Healey’s request for a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction is rendered moot after Tuesday’s announcement as the federal government provided the requested relief without a court ruling.

The state’s top prosecutor, in a statement Tuesday, called the ICE rule “senseless and illegal the minute it came out, and the Trump administration knew it didn’t have a chance.”

Harvard and MIT’s lawsuit argued that ICE failed to follow the Administrative Procedure Act which includes requirements for publishing notices of proposed and final rulemaking, issuance of policy statements, licenses, and permits. The filing called the July 6 directive “arbitrary and capricious because it ‘entirely fail[s] to consider important aspect[s] of the problem’ before ICE.’ “