The federal government is reversing the termination of legal status for international students after many filed court challenges around the U.S., a government lawyer said Friday, a decision that affects dozens of students in Maryland who suddenly lost their visas.

Judges around the country had already issued temporary orders restoring the students’ records in a federal database of international students maintained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. The records had been suddenly terminated in recent weeks, often without the students or their schools being notified.

A lawyer for the government read a statement in federal court in Oakland that said ICE was manually restoring the student status for people whose records were terminated in recent weeks. A similar statement was read by a government attorney in a separate case in Washington on Friday, said lawyer Brian Green, who represents the plaintiff in that case. Green provided The Associated Press with a copy of the statement that the government lawyer emailed to him.

It says: “ICE is developing a policy that will provide a framework for SEVIS record terminations. Until such a policy is issued, the SEVIS records for plaintiff(s) in this case (and other similarly situated plaintiffs) will remain Active or shall be re-activated if not currently active and ICE will not modify the record solely based on the NCIC finding that resulted in the recent SEVIS record termination.”

Green said that the government lawyer said it would apply to all students in the same situation, not just those who had filed lawsuits.

SEVIS is the Student and Exchange Visitor Information Systems database that tracks international students’ compliance with their visa status. NCIC is the National Crime Information Center, which is maintained by the FBI. Many of the students whose records were terminated were told that their status was terminated as a result of a criminal records check or that their visa had been revoked.

International students and their schools were caught off guard by the terminations of the students’ records. Many of the terminations were discovered when school officials were doing routine checks of the international student database or when they checked specifically after hearing about other terminations.

In Maryland, 37 international graduate students and recent graduates at the Johns Hopkins University lost their visas, while 12 were impacted at the University of Maryland, College Park and four at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Officials at all three universities said that the students whose visas were revoked were not known to be associated with pro-Palestinian actions on campus.

“We have received no information about the specific basis for the terminations, but we have no indication that they are associated with free expression activities on campus,” a message on the Hopkins website reads.

The University System of Maryland, Goucher College and Loyola University Maryland signed an amicus brief supporting a preliminary injunction to stop the Trump administration from revoking student visas without cause and arresting, detaining and deporting noncitizen students and faculty.