WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Friday abruptly moved to restore thousands of international students’ ability to study in the United States legally, but immigration officials insisted they would still try to terminate that legal status despite a wave of legal challenges.

The decision, which came during a court hearing in Washington, was a dramatic shift by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even as the administration characterized it as only a temporary reprieve.

The administration has moved to cancel more than 1,500 student visas in recent weeks.

On Friday morning, Joseph F. Carilli, a Justice Department lawyer, told a federal judge in Washington that immigration officials had begun work on a new system for reviewing and terminating the records of international students and academics who are studying in the United States.

Until the process was complete, he said, student records that had been purged from a federal database in recent weeks would be restored.

— TheNew York Times