President Donald Trump’s administration lashed back at Harvard University on Wednesday, with the Department of Homeland Security cutting over $2.7 million in grants and threatening to cancel all student visas, according to a press release obtained exclusively by The Free Press. The move comes two days after Harvard refused to agree to a series of demands by the administration, and Harvard’s president Alan Garber said that the university “will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.”
The DHS release states that Harvard is “unfit to be entrusted with taxpayer dollars.”
The funding cuts announced Wednesday include slashing over $800,000 for the Implementation Science for Targeted Violence Prevention grant and over $1.9 million to the Blue Campaign Program Evaluation and Violence Advisement grant, a program aimed at training police officers to “increase detection and investigation of human trafficking.”
Far more significant, DHS is “demanding detailed records on Harvard’s foreign student visa holders’ illegal and violent activities by April 30, 2025,” according to a letter sent to Harvard’s International Office and reviewed exclusively by The Free Press. Specifically, the letter requests “each student visa holder’s known illegal activity” in addition to these students’ “known dangerous or violent activity,” including “threats,” “deprivation of rights of other classmates,” and any information regarding “obstruction of the school’s learning environment.”
“The department views this as a direct response to the response from Harvard,” a source within the DHS told The Free Press. It follows the administration’s decision on Monday to freeze $2.2 billion in federal grants and contracts. “It’s very important that if they are receiving money from the federal government, they know that money is a privilege and not a right,” said the source. “Compliance with federal law and regulations is not an optional box they can check and uncheck at will.”
The letter was signed by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who, in the accompanying press release, described Harvard’s leadership as “spineless” and said that “Harvard’s position as a top institution of higher learning is a distant memory.” Noem also accused Harvard of “bending the knee to antisemitism”—claiming it had fueled “a cesspool of extremist riots and threatens our national security.”
The letter said that if Harvard failed to comply with DHS’s demand for foreign student records, it would lose access to the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP), which grants the university the ability to grant student visas. This would mean that all of the current student visas issued by Harvard to foreign students could also be terminated, forcing foreign students either to leave the country or transfer to another SEVP-certified school.
In its ongoing effort to punish Harvard, the Trump administration on Wednesday also asked the Internal Revenue Service to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, an idea the president first floated Tuesday in a post on Truth Social when he said Harvard should be taxed as a “political entity” for “pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness.’ ”
Many prominent Harvard professors have applauded the university’s willingness to stand up to the Trump administration. “I’m proud of Harvard and its leaders,” wrote Lawrence Tribe, the constitutional law scholar. Free speech groups such as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression have called the administration’s demands “unconstitutional,” and warned they “would essentially render Harvard a vassal institution, subjecting much of its corporate and academic governance to federal directives.”
A spokesman for Harvard did not immediately respond to a Free Press request for comment Wednesday evening.
For more on the fight between America’s best-known university and the Trump White House, read Charles Lane’s piece, “Harvard Had It Coming. That Doesn’t Mean Trump Is Right.