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DHS Rescinds Harvard Certification to Issue Student Visas
Harvard University has lost its certification under the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) and cannot accept any F-1 or J-1 visa student for the 2025-2026 academic year, announced Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. The decision affects more than 6,700 international students, who represent 27 percent of Harvard’s student body.
Noem announced the revocation on social media, then took to Twitter to issue a warning that her decision should be heard loud and clear by other colleges and universities across the country. She said that Harvard did not “correct its nondiscrimination policies and their application in universities in America” and that the university had 72 hours to meet several federal demands to obtain its certification.
In one of the demands, the administration also asked for the disciplinary records of all international students from the past five years, as well as the electronic evidence of any illegal or violent activity with which these international students were involved in campus.
Harvard denounced the move as illegal and retaliatory. The university said it prided itself on welcoming international scholars from more than 140 countries and warned that the move would harm both its academic mission and the country’s national interests. “This decision threatens serious harm to the Harvard community and, in the long term, to our nation,” the university said in a statement.
Confusion and Fury Among Students
The announcement immediately stirred anxiety in Harvard’s international student community. With graduation just days away, many have no idea what their legal status — or future — in the United States will be. “Australian graduate student Sarah Davis (@sarahdavii), president of the Australia and New Zealand Caucus at Harvard Kennedy School, weighed in on the cloudy language. “This is clearly going to have a lot of very uncertain implications for whether we’re able to stay on in the United States afterwards and keep working here,” she said.
“It’s awful,” said Leo Gerdén, a 22-year-old Swedish undergraduate. “We’re all being treated like poker chips in a game between the White House and Harvard,” he said, referring to the treatment as dehumanizing. Gerdén, like others his age, had gone to Harvard hoping for academic freedom and free speech. “Harvard is not Harvard without the international students,” he said.
More General Battle Between Trump Administration and Universities
It’s not the first time the Trump administration has targeted higher education institutions. Dozens of universities have announced that they are investigating, and several, including Columbia University, have made changes. Earlier this year, Harvard declined to turn over a long list of federal requests, then later received notice from the government that it had mistakenly given the request to the Ivy League institution, and the school sued.
The administration has also pushed Harvard to change its admissions, hiring and teaching practices to fight antisemitism. Other threats were to take away Harvard’s tax-exempt status and freeze billions of dollars in federal funding.
The letter from DHS on Thursday is the most direct and recent escalation. In a separate federal ruling, a court in California temporarily stopped the administration from canceling the legal status of overseas students while lawsuits contesting the policy remain pending.
Even as it has already led to confusion and emotional distress on campuses, the administration’s actions have kicked off a slate of legal challenges. Gerdén considered a larger significance to the situation: “We came to this country in the first place for what America represents: the right to free speech, academic freedom, a robust intellectual community. And now Trump puts all those values at risk.”
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