Trump administration revokes Harvard's ability to enrol international students

U.S. President Donald Trump's administration revoked Harvard University's ability to enrol international students on Thursday, and is forcing existing students to transfer to other schools or lose their legal status, while also threatening to expand the crackdown to other schools.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem ordered the department to terminate the Harvard University's Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification effective for the 2025-26 school year, the department said in a statement.

Harvard said the move, which affects thousands of students, was illegal and amounted to retaliation.

Student Leo Gerdén hails from Sweden and studies economics and government at Harvard. He said Thursday's news was "heartbreaking" for him and his fellow international students.

"We are being used as poker chips right now in a battle between the White House and Harvard," Gerdén, who is in his final year of studies at the university, told CBC News.

"There is a lot of uncertainty right now about what is going to happen and people are definitely worried," he said. "It's been a dream for so many to come to this institution and come to this country and study, and now, all of that might be taken away from us."

• Are you a Canadian attending Harvard University? How will the Trump administration's move to bar foreign students affect you and your studies? We'd like to hear from you. Send an email to ask@cbc.ca

Alex Usher, the president of Toronto-based Higher Education Strategy Associates, says the U.S. government's actions could have a chilling effect on the aspirations of students from abroad who dream of studying at Harvard.

"It's sending messages to potential students abroad that we don't want you, that you will be treated as a pawn in... domestic political games and you shouldn't bother applying," Usher said.

Many prominent Canadians have studied at Harvard, including past prime ministers William Lyon Mackenzie King, Pierre Trudeau and current Prime Minister Mark Carney. Author Margaret Atwood, Alberta NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi, Halifax Mayor Andy Fillmore, former governor general David Johnston and former federal Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff are also Harvard alumni. Chrystia Freeland, the federal minister for transport and internal trade, is a Harvard grad as well.

The clampdown on foreign students marks a significant escalation of the Trump administration's campaign against the elite Ivy League university in Cambridge, Mass., which has emerged as one of Trump's most prominent institutional targets.

Harvard 'fully committed' to educating foreign students

The move comes after Harvard refused to provide information that Noem had previously demanded about some foreign student visa holders who attend the university, the department said.

Harvard enrolled nearly 6,800 international students in the 2024-25 school year, amounting to 27 per cent of its total enrolment, according to university statistics.

In 2022, Chinese nationals made up the biggest population of foreign students with 1,016, university figures show. After that were students from Canada, India, South Korea, the U.K., Germany, Australia, Singapore and Japan.

"It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enrol foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition payments to help pad their multi-billion dollar endowments," Noem said in a statement.

In a letter to the university, Noem gave Harvard "the opportunity" to regain its certification by turning over within 72 hours a raft of records about foreign students, including any video or audio of their protest activity in the past five years.

Harvard called the government's action unlawful, and said it was "fully committed" to educating foreign students.

"This retaliatory action threatens serious harm to the Harvard community and our country, and undermines Harvard's academic and research mission," the university said in a statement.

Congressional Democrats denounced the revocation, with U.S. Rep. Jaime Raskin calling it an "intolerable attack on Harvard's independence and academic freedom" and saying it was government retaliation for Harvard's previous resistance to Trump.

Nick Akerman, a former federal prosecutor who worked on the Watergate case, said the administration's move is "totally unprecedented" and will likely be stopped by the courts.

"I don't think there's any way that any court is going to stand for this," Akerman, who went to Harvard Law School, told the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

Trump has already frozen several billion dollars in federal grants to Harvard in recent weeks, leading the university to sue to restore the funding.

In a separate lawsuit related to Trump efforts to terminate the legal status of hundreds of foreign students across the U.S., a federal judge ruled on Thursday that the administration could not end their status without following proper regulatory procedures. It was not immediately clear how that ruling would affect the action against Harvard.

'A warning to every other university'

Noem said she was "absolutely" considering similar moves against other universities, including Columbia University in New York.

"This should be a warning to every other university to get your act together," she said on the Fox News program The Story with Martha MacCallum.

Trump, a Republican, took office in January pledging a wide-ranging immigration crackdown. His administration has tried to revoke student visas and green cards of foreign students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests.

He has undertaken an extraordinary effort to revamp private colleges and schools across the U.S. that he says foster anti-American, Marxist and "radical left" ideologies. He has criticized Harvard in particular for hiring prominent Democrats to teaching or leadership positions.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said on Monday that it was terminating $60 million US in federal grants to Harvard because it failed to address antisemitic harassment and ethnic discrimination on campus.

In a legal complaint filed earlier this month, Harvard said it was committed to combating antisemitism and had taken steps to ensure its campus is safe and welcoming to Jewish and Israeli students.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow with the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration advocacy group, said the action against Harvard's student visa program "needlessly punishes thousands of innocent students."

"None of them have done anything wrong. They're just collateral damage to Trump," he said on the social media site Bluesky.

Foreign undergraduates at U.S. colleges typically pay full tuition, an important source of revenue for colleges and universities.

International students at Harvard also contributed to the local economy, data from NAFSA, the Association of International Educators suggests. They were estimated to have spent $384 million US a year in the 2023-24 school year, supporting some 3,900 jobs through their payments for housing, dining, retail and other services and goods.