Kai Nip

Early Friday morning, Harvard University sued the Trump administration after the Department of Homeland Security terminated the school’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program, or SEVP, certification. The move would have forced Harvard’s 6,793 international students — 27.2 percent of its student body — to “transfer or lose their legal status,” per a Homeland Security news release.

Later Friday morning, a federal judge in Boston issued a temporary restraining order that blocked the revocation from being implemented.

Four international students at Yale wrote to the News that Yale should be ready to take in “displaced” international students from Harvard. 

Yale’s Office of International Students and Scholars declined to comment on whether the University would be willing to accept international students from Harvard under special circumstances, how the Office plans to advise concerned international students at Yale and the possibility of the federal government revoking Yale’s SEVP certification in the future.

Universities need a SEVP certification to access the DHS’s Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or SEVIS, to show that international students are enrolled and meeting the terms of their student visas. On Thursday, the federal government removed Harvard’s ability to access SEVIS. 

In a Friday statement, Harvard President Alan Garber condemned the government’s move as “unlawful and unwarranted.” Harvard’s lawsuit describes the revocation as a “blatant violation” of the First Amendment, the Due Process Clause and the Administrative Procedure Act. The Administrative Procedure Act directs federal courts to set aside agency actions that they find “arbitrary and capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with the law.”

“[The revocation] is the latest act by the government in clear retaliation for Harvard exercising its First Amendment rights to reject the government’s demands to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum, and the ‘ideology’ of its faculty and students,” the lawsuit says.

International students at Yale reached by the News expressed “full solidarity” with those affected at Harvard. 

Tiona Zeng ’28, who is a permanent resident with Chinese citizenship, wrote that while she is in disbelief and “can’t conceptualize the magnitude of this move,” she would not be surprised if the administration took a similar action against Yale. 

Zeng also felt that Yale should consider a temporary transfer agreement with Harvard to potentially accommodate any international students who may need to leave Harvard. Her brother graduated from Harvard last year, and she would have wanted Yale to accept him as a transfer today, she said.

“I would absolutely support that — whether that required hosting extra students in the dorm, increasing class sizes, or whatever else — if that becomes necessary,” she wrote. 

Yale’s undergraduate admissions office did not respond to the News’ requests for comment on this matter. 

Former dean of Yale Law School and current professor Harold Hongju Koh, who served as the legal adviser of the U.S. Department of State under the Obama administration, called the federal government’s decision to revoke Harvard’s SEVP certification “stunningly counterproductive and punitive.”

“This Administration is so myopically focused on retaliating against resistance that it misses the obvious reality: that Harvard and Yale are global magnets that attract the world’s finest students to build lifelong ties, across generations that help all of us work together to address an uncertain and interdependent future,” Koh wrote to the News. “Yale should unqualifiedly support Harvard in swiftly getting this revocation blocked as illegal.”

Koh added that he lives in the United States thanks to the country’s welcoming of his parents as international students. His late father was an international student at Harvard, he told the News.

In a Thursday letter to Harvard, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem accused Harvard’s leadership of condoning an antisemitic environment on campus and of employing “racist” diversity, equity and inclusion policies. According to the letter, the SEVP termination is a result of Harvard’s failure to provide the government with sufficient records of “misconduct and other offenses that would render foreign students inadmissible or removable.”

Garber’s Friday statement claims that “Harvard did respond to the Department’s requests as required by law.”

Noem told Fox News on Thursday night that she would consider terminating the SEVP certifications of other universities deemed to have fostered antisemitic environments. 

Twenty-eight percent of enrolled Yale University students are international, according to an University webpage.