More than 130 international students across the United States have joined a federal lawsuit accusing the Trump administration of unlawfully cancelling their visas, jeopardising their legal status in the country, court documents show.

The students allege that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) abruptly and illegally terminated their status in the government’s Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (Sevis) database, putting them at risk of arrest, detention and deportation.

The initial complaint was filed by 17 students on April 11 in the state of Georgia. Since then, 116 more have joined them as the administration of US President Donald Trump pursues a wide-ranging immigration crackdown that has targeted foreign students, among many others.

Across campuses in the United States, international students have been scrambling as they have discovered their visas have been revoked, often for little or no reason, according to court documents and media reports.

The Georgia lawsuit names US Attorney General Pam Bondi, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons as defendants and seeks to reinstate the revoked visas.

In the complaint, which does not identify the students by name “due to fear of retaliation”, the summaries offered for each of the 17 original cases reveal seemingly arbitrary cancellations, with each plaintiff giving their best guess as to what may have prompted them to be targeted.

Some pointed to minor traffic infringements, such as John Doe 2, a Chinese citizen pursuing an engineering doctorate at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

He was notified by his school that his visa was revoked after a criminal records check, but the violation was not specified. The student believes it may have been related to a traffic offence that was closed, and according to the filing, he has no other criminal history.

Another of the students, an Indian national at New York Institute of Technology, said he had been found not guilty of shoplifting, and the case was dismissed.

“Over the past week, visa revocations and Sevis terminations have shaken campuses across the country,” the complaint says. “The Sevis terminations have taken place against the backdrop of numerous demands being made of universities by the federal government and threats of cutting off billions of dollars in federal funding.”

The suit also noted that students’ removal from the government database could jeopardise the individuals’ ability to reenter the United States in the future.