International students have a new reality to grapple with as the Trump administration signals no U.S. campus is a safe haven while it tries to yank them out of Harvard University.
In attempting to block Harvard’s ability to enroll foreign-born students, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) explicitly said the move is “a warning to every other university to get your act together,” scrambling campus communities far from Cambridge, Mass.
“We’re taking a look at a lot of things,” President Trump said Friday when asked if he is considering similar moves at other schools.
For the more than 1 million foreign-born college students in the U.S. whose visas are tied to their education, that’s a potentially life-altering threat.
Shaun Carver, executive director of International House at the University of California, Berkeley, said that while the DHS’s announcement “was targeted towards Harvard, it really is kind of a shot across the bow of any public or private institution across the United States.”
“The damage is done. I mean, a lot of the uncertainty that this creates for international students across the country is just — it’s inhumane. It just is not fair that a lot of these international students are being kind of put at risk for no reason, no fault of their own,” Carver said.
A judge has temporarily paused the order from the DHS and scheduled a hearing for Thursday, acknowledging Harvard’s concern “will sustain immediate and irreparable injury before there is an opportunity to hear from all parties.”
While it’s a temporarily sigh of relief for international students, damage to the reputation of the United States as a destination for foreign scholars has built up over the past few months, according to advocates.
While foreign students only make up 6 percent of those who study at U.S. universities, Trump has put an outsized focus on them since the beginning of his presidency.
His administration has nixed thousands of student visas, many with little explanation, causing some to flee the country over fear of arrest, though some of the visas have later been restored.
Others have been detained and accused of supporting Hamas or posing a threat to U.S. foreign policy over their involvement in last year’s pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
And all the while, Trump is also going after colleges themselves: cutting funding, demanding policy changes or, in the case of schools such as Harvard, both.
“What I think is now becoming a challenge for international students is they’re asking themselves this question, ‘Are we really welcome in America?’ And they want certainty. They want stability. They want clarity, and they want transparency,” said Fanta Aw, executive director and CEO of NAFSA: Association of International Educators.
“This is a major investment for students and their families to make, and they’re not willing to jeopardize their future with, literally, actions that are happening on a weekly basis, such as revocation of visas, termination of SEVIS records … And so, given that they’re absolutely looking at other options, and those other options are Europe, Asia and elsewhere, and this will be the loss … to the United States,” Aw added.
Trump’s war against Harvard in particular now includes two separate lawsuits from the school against his administration: one against the foreign students move and an earlier one after he froze billions of dollars in federal funding.
While other schools aren’t necessarily going to change how they conduct business based on the Harvard fight, it is unsettling for higher education to see the nation’s oldest and richest school fighting to stay independent.
“It has a chilling impact for institutions who may be coming up on a recertification or knowing that the federal government is going to be applying the regulation in this way for seemingly political reasons, and that’s really upsetting,” said Sarah Spreitzer, vice president and chief of staff for government relations at the American Council on Education.
Miriam Feldblum, president and CEO of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, says some schools in her alliance are already seeing higher rates of international students declining acceptances.
“It’s too early yet to see the full scope of it, but some things are coming into focus,” Feldblum said.
“You may want to think about this as just a singular attack on Harvard and on the issues between the administration and Harvard, but from our perspective, these actions are also heightening the climate of fear, anxiety, uncertainty that has disrupted the lives of students, faculty and campuses across the country in recent months,” she added. “I think that this is not done in a vacuum, and it’s just adding fuel to the uncertainty that is going across the U.S., especially for international students, but also for campuses.”