Early last week, in the wee hours of the morning here in Hong Kong, my WhatsApp started to pop with messages. Some were from anxious friends. Others came from family, including my niece who has been studying law in the US. “Today was a hard day. “This morning the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that international students whose classes are all online in the fall will have to leave. My courses are all online. We don’t know what to do,” she said. I was shocked to hear that the United States had decided , with no warning or consultation, to throw the lives of 1.1 million international students – including 370,000 from China and 7,500 from Hong Kong – into even further chaos by threatening them with deportation during the pandemic. The decision to keep schools open, or closed, at the appropriate time is an extremely difficult calculation. I realise that in both Hong Kong and the US, governments need to take sudden and sometimes unpopular measures to protect public health. Even so, the abrupt US decision to send all international students back home if their school has gone fully online was poorly thought out, inflexible and cruel. Let’s look at the timeline of what happened. In mid-March, when the US began reacting to the pandemic, many universities began moving instruction online, or ending semesters early. The Trump administration, reasonably, gave temporary extensions to international students on the F-1 visa. Based on this, many Asian students decided to stay in the US. Some worried that they wouldn’t be able to easily return to class in the fall. International students from China faced additional hurdles and expenses. Because of US quarantine restrictions on people travelling from China, if they went back home in March, then tried to return for the fall semester, they would have to first spend 14 days in a third country before being allowed back into the US. Meanwhile, flights home got cancelled or became prohibitively expensive . While the cliché in the US is that international students, particularly Asian ones, come from wealthy backgrounds, there are countless students for whom this isn’t true. Young people from modest, even poor, families study abroad on scholarships. They can’t afford to just pack up and fly home. Doors slam shut on Chinese students amid US espionage fears Last week, the Trump administration suddenly made an about-face. If a school wasn’t holding in-person classes this fall, students had to return to their home countries, or transfer (within only two months!) to a school with in-person classes. If we are giving the US authorities the benefit of the doubt, then I suppose their reasoning was this: if a school’s classes are all online, international students can study from anywhere. But did anyone at the ICE think this through? For Asian students – and half of the 1.1 million international students in the US are from Asia – taking online classes from home means that you are trying to keep up with your studies from nine, 10, even 12 time zones away. That means getting up at 2am in mainland China or Hong Kong to attend afternoon classes at Harvard (which will be fully online this fall). This also assumes you live in a country or region with enough internet bandwidth to join classes in the first place. But of course this wasn’t a logical decision – it was a political one. Because of his inept handling of the pandemic, President Donald Trump’s re-election prospects are dimming. He desperately needs to make it seem like it’s business as usual in the US in the run-up to the election. The ICE directive was a way to strong-arm US schools into keeping their campuses open in September – by threatening the status of their international students, who represent a hefty portion of US university revenue. I’m happy to see that the US academic community quickly saw through the politics and immediately began finding workarounds to keep the students in the US. Many schools offered hybrid classes, to meet the new visa requirements. They also mounted a legal challenge: 180 American universities, including my own alma mater, joined lawsuits to force the US government to keep the March emergency visa extension alive. Tech companies including Google, Facebook and Twitter joined in. The policy is reckless, cruel and senseless, they argued. On Tuesday, the Trump administration walked back its decision . The students can stay. Kudos to the US universities and companies who stood up and fought to right a wrong. And shame on the Trump administration for using students as political pawns. Bernard Chan is convenor of Hong Kong’s Executive Council