2 is the answer. They probably hardly cared whether the rule was successfully implemented. They succeeded in spreading FUD and in the future, prospective international students will think twice before deciding to study in the US. The damage is done.

Lots of top tier universities are already opening foreign campuses. Future students will just end up there. This move accelerated the rise of foreign top tier mind work at the expense of that work in the USA. Couple this with the antagonistic stance by the administration to foreign highly capable workers and you have a recipe for a tech softening in the USA.

This is good for the world. Part of me sees this as a cynical ploy to tear down others' futures to support the base. I do think the US needs massive education reform, costs are through the roof and large universities are farming foreign students but this isn't the way to do it.

Those foreign campuses are also known to be a joke and cash grabs. Foreign governments pay universities basically to use their brand, they pay some professors to visit for a month and put that campus's affiliation on a few papers, and claim that they are publishing state-of-the-art research and training their own students. Meanwhile, none of those students are prepared, and the campus doesn't attract any students besides local students, so it's just a local institution with a foreign brand.

Can you expand on this please? What countries are these campuses in?

Here is one: https://nyuad.nyu.edu/en/

I see, a new NYU campus in Abu-Dhabi, but is it still NYU if it's based in in Abu Dhabi? Wouldn;t that be more like ADU (funded by NYU)?

I wonder how they'll compare tuition wise and whether that would incentivize foreign students to stay home. New York is a very expensive city but it is also a different experience.

More likely, some will think twice and most will still come

Mostly 3. (or more charitably they hoped the covid emergency would be winding down by now)

Here, ICE attempted to rollback the current emergency rule and put in place a new rule that was broader and more flexible than the pre-covid-19 rule. They have pulled that back now.

But, as soon as the Covid-19 national emergency order expires, the current emergency rule can be easily reverted to the stricter pre-covid-19 rule if that's what the Admin wants. Otherwise, a new rule (following administrative law rule-making requirements) can be made to implement the broader/flexible policy ICE was seeking here.

edit-to-add: Trump could probably issue an Executive Order directing ICE to change its rules.

It's just red meat for the base. The administration doesn't actually want to restrict immigration, they just know that they were hired to restrict immigration, so they have to appear to be working on that. Notice that every single time they've done any kind of immigration restriction, they either walk it back within 72 hours, or allow themselves to be stopped in court. It's all just a sham for the voters in an election year.

#2 - This was just a big distraction to get the ADD media to forget about Russian bounties on US troops.

I doubt the troops will forget it though and this will comeback as the election nears.

How about we start requiring proof before we just endlessly allow unnamed sources to dictate our outrage? The Russian Bounty story has all sorts of problems.

https://fair.org/home/in-russian-bounty-story-evidence-free-...

This is a theme of the media: use unnamed sources with no ability for stories to be independently verified and then create an anti-Trump scandal over it. Over and over we go through this.

Do you not see a problem with media outlets requiring sources name themselves when speaking out against someone in a position of power? I'd much prefer the current situation of corroborating a scandal through what is often multiple sources in multiple publications if the alternative is not hearing about scandals that do exist.

It's a combination of #2 and #3. The Trump administration has a strategy that should be very clear by now: implement or propose outlandish policy, then use it as leverage for gains in some orthogonal area while walking it back. This is deal-making 101, Trump (or his ghost-writer) writes about it in all his books, and it's an obvious trend. He uses this tact in domestic policy and trade deals, and tbh it's pretty effective.

It is effective for short-term gains, but it also causes so much chaos and destruction that it isn’t sustainable long-term (see: Trump bankruptcies)

It's both, actually.

Hamfisted malice.

Perhaps most disturbingly, it demonstrates how effective non-hamfisted malice might be.

The Trump campaign vaulted to the top during the 2016 primary with his hard line immigration proposals. The border wall promise was his political breakthrough. Immigration is the key issue for many of his voters. He has been consistently strict on immigration accordingly. The decision maker was probably just following that policy line, and then got overruled by the details. In particular I assume Trump's lawyers predicted a bruising, losing court fight.