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Trump bars foreign nationals from entering US to study at Harvard [1]

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Date: 2025-06-04

“This is yet another illegal retaliatory step taken by the administration in violation of Harvard’s First Amendment rights,” Harvard spokesperson Sarah Kennedy-O’Reilly said. “Harvard will continue to protect its international students.”

Trump invoked national security powers to impose a six-month block on student visa holders from entering the country to study at Harvard. He also said Secretary of State Marco Rubio would review on a case by case basis the status of current international students to determine whether their visas should be revoked.

President Trump late Wednesday imposed severe restrictions on international students coming to Harvard University, sidestepping a court order last week that had blocked the administration from revoking the school’s ability to enroll students from overseas.

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The travel ban was just one of two extraordinary steps the Trump administration took Wednesday to ratchet up pressure on elite universities and get them to accede to a series of demands that seek to stamp out what Trump perceives as leftist bias, tolerance of antisemitism, and discrimination against white people and men.

In what could be another ominous development for Harvard, the Trump administration brandished a new weapon earlier when it informed the accrediting agency for Columbia University that the Ivy League school has violated civil rights laws, triggering a process that could ultimately lead to Columbia forfeiting all federal financial aid for its students.

The Trump administration's battle with the university shows no signs of slowing down. Here's everything you need to know up through Commencement Day. ( Olivia Yarvis/Globe Staff )

Accrediting agencies are nonprofits that monitor the finances, academics, and policies of colleges and universities. Higher education institutions need their stamp of approval to be eligible for the federal financial aid most students receive.

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And although the accrediting agencies are private nonprofits, they operate only with the blessing of the secretary of education, which gives the Trump administration significant leverage.

On the campaign trail last year, Trump called the effort to deny accreditation a “secret weapon” he would use to reshape American universities.

The travel ban imposed on Harvard’s international students is also a novel use of federal power that some lawyers say is illegal.

Nikolas Bowie, professor of law at Harvard Law School, said, “There is no plausible explanation for this order other than the Trump administration’s outspoken desire to retaliate against Harvard for standing on its legal rights.”

In late May, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem revoked Harvard’s ability to participate in the Student and Exchange Visa Program, the federal program that enables colleges and universities to enroll or hire people with education visas.

Harvard challenged the revocation in court and won a temporary restraining order, which is currently in force. But in his order Wednesday, Trump said he was unilaterally barring international students from entering the country to study at at Harvard “for crucial national-security reasons.”

“Our adversaries, including the People’s Republic of China, try to take advantage of American higher education by exploiting the student visa program for improper purposes and by using visiting students to collect information at elite universities in the United States,” Trump wrote, referring to allegations the Chinese government poaches scientific advancements from American universities.

Rubio said last week that the United States would begin revoking the visas of Chinese students at American universities, including those studying in “critical fields.” In a separate proclamation Wednesday night, Trump implemented a travel ban on visitors from Haiti and 11 countries in Africa and the Middle East.

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Karl Molden, a rising junior at Harvard, was in Vienna when he heard the news. He’d just had a farewell party with friends he won’t be seeing again until Christmas. “It’s shocking. I was trembling — it’s just crazy to me that Trump is committing an executive overreach and using an emergency power to portray us as a national security threat,” Molden said.

In its action against Columbia, the administration told the accrediting agency, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, that the school violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by failing to protect Jewish students from discrimination and harassment during campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war.

Now, the department says Columbia must take steps to be in compliance with the Trump administration’s interpretation of the law. If it doesn’t, the accreditor must take action against Columbia, the department said, which could include stripping its accreditation.

“After Hamas’ October 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel, Columbia University’s leadership acted with deliberate indifference towards the harassment of Jewish students on its campus,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a press release Wednesday. “We look forward to the Commission keeping the Department fully informed of actions taken to ensure Columbia’s compliance with accreditation standards including compliance with federal civil rights laws.”

The Middle States Commission confirmed it received a letter Wednesday from the administration, but declined to comment further.

A Columbia spokesperson, Sean Savett, said the university is “aware of the concerns raised by the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights today to our accreditor. . . . Columbia is deeply committed to combatting antisemitism on our campus. We take this issue seriously and are continuing to work with the federal government to address it.”

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Higher education leaders on both sides of the political spectrum said the administration’s accreditation threat was extraordinary.

“It’s unprecedented because it’s not telling accreditors, ‘Here’s a new standard you should follow,’ ” said Larry Ladd, a former budget chief at Harvard. “It’s saying, ‘You should take specific action against a specific institution.’ ”

Peter Wood, president of the conservative National Association of Scholars, said it would be “wholly unprecedented” for an Ivy League university to lose its accreditation.

“But unprecedented doesn’t mean it can’t happen, we now know. I think it’s out there as a pretty serious threat,” he said.

The action also raised questions about the status of negotiations between Columbia and the Trump administration, and more broadly, about the strategy or wisdom of agreeing to the White House’s demands. In March, after the Trump administration froze hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding, Columbia said it would comply with a list of demands related to academics and disciplinary procedures.

In April, Harvard rejected an even more intrusive set of demands from the Trump administration and sued, setting up a confrontation that is now in its third month and has featured billions in cuts to its federal funding and threats to block the school’s enrollment of international students, including Trump’s Wednesday decree.

On Wednesday, McMahon told reporters, “I’d love to have Harvard come back to the table to negotiate with us.”

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The Trump administration is also investigating dozens of other universities and has cut funding at more than half a dozen elite schools.

Wood and other conservative higher education leaders say accreditors are part of the problem due to what they characterize as the agencies’ commitment to progressive ideals, such as diversity, equity, and inclusion. Trump officials and allies have said they would co-opt accreditors to advance their own priorities.

Wood, who is generally supportive of Trump’s higher education priorities, viewed the accreditation threat as a negotiating tactic.

“This is an opening move meant to bring the other side to the negotiating table,” or apply additional pressure, he said. It’s likely to result in “some kind of settlement short of losing accreditation, but it’s a good chess move on the part of the administration,” he said.

Lawrence Schall, the head of the association that accredits Harvard, said the administration’s announcement was irregular and concerning.

“I think this just shows a misunderstanding of the accreditation process, a misunderstanding of the actual Department of Education regulations that pertain to accreditation,” said Schall, president of the New England Commission of Higher Education. “Accrediting agencies are meant to be independent agencies. We’re not the enforcer of federal law.”

Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, which represents around 1,600 colleges and universities, said, “The accreditors will, I’m sure, treat any violations of Title VI seriously, as they do in all such cases.”

However, he added, the federal government is required to resolve alleged civil rights violations through established federal procedures, not through the accreditation process.

“This is another case of the administration running ahead of the law for the sake of the headlines,” he said.

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Brooke Hauser and Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio of the Globe staff contributed to this story.

Mike Damiano can be reached at [email protected].

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[1] Url: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/06/04/metro/columbia-accreditation-harvard-trump/

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