Court Blocks the F-1/J-1 “Duration of Status” Rule One Day Before It Took Effect

September 14th, just before 9 p.m.

Mei had already marked tomorrow on her calendar. September 15th — the day, she'd been told, that the phrase “duration of status” would quietly disappear from her life. She's a second-year PhD student in Boston. For weeks she'd read the same three paragraphs over and over: fixed admission dates, a four-year clock, a grace period cut in half. She had a folder on her desktop labeled “I-539 (just in case).”

Then her phone lit up. A group chat, then another. A federal judge — in Boston, of all places, a few miles from her lab — had blocked the rule the night before it was supposed to start.

She read it three times before she let herself believe it.

Here's what happened, and what it means for you.

What the court did

On September 14, 2026, Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts issued a nationwide preliminary injunction stopping the Department of Homeland Security from implementing its new “fixed period of admission” rule. The case is Presidents' Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration v. DHS, No. 1:26-cv-13799. A coalition of universities, education groups, and unions brought it in August; the judge heard argument on September 3; eleven days later, he ruled.

The order does two things. It keeps the long-standing “duration of status” (D/S) system in place, and it bars DHS and ICE from taking any step to put the new rule into effect while the lawsuit continues. The judge found that the plaintiffs are likely to win — that the rule looks “arbitrary and capricious” under the Administrative Procedure Act — and that letting it start would cause immediate, irreparable harm to students and scholars.

Translation: the thing you were bracing for tomorrow is not happening tomorrow.