Senior State Department officials tell Fox News all visa holders associated with Harvard University are being scrutinized, not just student visa holders.
Along with student visas, the State Department will be conducting a substantive investigation into B-1, or business visas; B-2, or tourist visas; as well as others, officials said.
The investigation is aimed at identifying potential security vulnerabilities or other abuses of the visa system.
The probe could impact hundreds of people associated with the elite school and could reveal if people entering with claimed connections truly have real connections or more tenuous connections.
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Fox News Digital learned earlier in the day that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is eliminating the student visa program at Harvard University due to “pro-terrorist conduct” at campus protests.
The move is a severe consequence in response to what the DHS claims is Harvard’s refusal to comply with its requests for behavioral records of student visa holders.
“This administration is holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus,” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said. “It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition payments to help pad their multibillion-dollar endowments. Harvard had plenty of opportunity to do the right thing. It refused. They have lost their Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification as a result of their failure to adhere to the law. Let this serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions across the country.”
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Harvard may no longer enroll foreign students in the 2025-2026 school year, and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status to reside in the U.S. before the next academic year begins.
“As a result of your brazen refusal to comply with multiple requests to provide the Department of Homeland Security pertinent information while perpetuating an unsafe campus environment that is hostile to Jewish students, promotes pro-Hamas rhetoric, and employs racist ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ policies, you have lost this privilege,” Noem wrote in a letter to Maureen Martin, the university’s director of immigration services.
Noem offered Harvard 72 hours to provide the information requested for an opportunity to regain its visa program for the next school year.
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She called the move the “direct result of Harvard’s epic failure to comply with simple reporting requirements.”
Harvard, meanwhile, asserted the termination was “unlawful.”
Last month, Harvard announced it would allow foreign students to accept admission to both Harvard and a foreign university as backup amid the Trump administration’s threats to move to block Harvard’s authorization to host them. Typically, students must accept enrollment at Harvard by May 1 and can’t commit to another university.
At least a dozen Harvard students have had their authorization to study in the U.S. revoked over campus protest activity.
The Trump administration has already frozen close to $3 billion in federal funding to the university, largely dedicated to research, and launched investigations across the departments of Justice, Education and Health and Human Services. They claim that Harvard has failed to address campus antisemitism and eradicate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in its policies.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Wednesday the U.S. will begin “aggressively” revoking visas of Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.
He also told Congress this week that the State Department had probably revoked “thousands” of student visas by this point and would “proudly” revoke more.
“We’re going to continue to revoke the visas of people who are here as guests and are disrupting our higher education facilities,” he said Tuesday. “A visa is a privilege, not a right.”
The crackdown on university policies comes after a wave of pro-Gaza student protests and encampments swept schools across the nation since the beginning of Israel’s offensive campaign to eradicate Hamas after the Oct. 7 attacks to pressure university administrations to divest from Israel.
Fox News Digital’s Morgan Phillips contributed to this report.
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