Trump Administration Bans Harvard from Enrolling International Students
Boston, MA — On Thursday, the Trump administration barred Harvard University from enrolling international students. This comes as the university escalates a legal fight with the administration over funding, because of the alleged failure to confront anti-Semitism.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem ordered DHS to terminate Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certification. This means the Ivy League university can no longer enroll foreign students and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status.
The Trump admin charged that Harvard’s leadership has created an unsafe campus environment “by permitting anti-American, pro-terrorist agitators to harass and physically assault individuals, including many Jewish students, and otherwise obstruct its once-venerable learning environment.” It claimed that many of these agitators are foreign students, and facilitated and engaged in coordinated activity with the Chinese Communist party.
Harvard is among dozens of US universities facing similar demands from the Trump administration, but it has emerged as the fiercest defender of its academic independence.
Since October 7th, colleges have been ground zero of pro-Hamas protests, and thousands of Jewish students at college, including Harvard — and more infamously, Columbia — have reported anti-Semitic harassment and assaults, to a blind eye and deaf ear: college administrators. And the Trump administration has gone after them for their failure and demanding they fix the problem, and for those who refuse they pulled funding, tax exemption and now: SEVP certification.
The decision could affect more than a quarter of Harvard’s heavily international student body. The university says that it enrolled 10,158 international students from 150 different countries, in 2025.
Harvard clamped back at the administration, “Harvard is committed to maintaining our ability to host our international students and scholars, who hail from more than 140 countries and enrich the University and this nation. More information and updates will be provided as they become available.”
“Harvard University has repeatedly failed to confront the pervasive race discrimination and anti-Semitic harassment plaguing its campus,” the administration’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism said in a statement earlier this month. “That shameful legacy has continued on as recognized by Harvard’s own Presidential Task Force on Combating Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, which lays bare an appalling reality: Jewish students were subjected to pervasive insults, physical assault, and intimidation, with no meaningful response from Harvard’s leadership.”
Anti-Semitism in Massachusetts
Earlier this year, Shmooze.News previously reported that anti-Semitism hit an 8-year high in 2023. The report analyzed numbers from local police departments and college campuses, highlighting a 70% increase in anti-Semitic hate crimes from 2022 to 2023 alone.
In 2023, anti-Jewish hate crimes were reported nearly 70% more than in the previous eight years, marking the third straight year where Jewish people and communities were targeted more than the year prior in the Bay State.
Specifically, there were 119 reports of anti-Jewish crimes reported in 2023, up from 70 in 2022. By crime type, 82 were destruction of property, 23 were intimidation, and six were assaults. Suffolk (which includes Boston) and Middlesex Counties had the largest amount of anti-Semitic hate crimes, 28 and 45 respectively, followed by Norfolk with 13.
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