In a drastic move to prevent foreign students from enrolling at Harvard University, the White House announced on Wednesday that US President Donald Trump has issued a proclamation suspending international visas for new students.
The proclamation prohibits almost all new Harvard University students from entering the United States as non-immigrants using the same visas that most international students use to enroll into American universities or take part in academic exchange programs.
The White House said in a statement on Wednesday that it also instructs the Secretary of State “to consider revoking” those visas, also known as F, M, and J visas, for current Harvard University students who meet the proclamation’s “criteria.”
The White House accused Harvard of having “concerning foreign ties” and claimed the move was an effort to protect “national security.” The university was accused of failing to “provide sufficient information” regarding international students and of “reporting deficient data on only three students,” according to the notice.
The White House said, “Harvard is either not fully reporting its disciplinary records for foreign students or is not seriously policing its foreign students.” It further accused that the Ivy League school continued to prioritise diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) while ignoring antisemitism on the campus.
The court case started when Kristi Noem, Homeland Security secretary issued a directive ordering her agency to terminate Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certification, citing the university’s failure to provide the DHS with the conduct records of international students that it had requested in April.
Harvard claimed the revocation was “clear retaliation” for the university’s reluctance to comply with the government’s ideologically rooted policy demands, accusing the agency of not adhering to its own guidelines for withdrawing a university from the SEVP program.
For months, Harvard and Trump officials have been at odds over the administration’s demands that the university alter its hiring and admissions, campus programming, policies to combat on-campus antisemitism and end what it refers to as “racist ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ practices.”
The White House has targeted foreign students and employees it believes took part in controversial demonstrations on campuses against the Israel-Hamas conflict. The attacks on Harvard started on March 31 when Trump administration officials informed the university in a letter that they would review all the Ivy League school’s contracts and grants totaling about $9 billion.