DHS Secretary Kristi Noem Announces Millions More in Grants Cut From Harvard – Threatens School’s Ability to Enroll Foreign Students

BREAKING: Harvard has been warned that unless it fully complies with all DHS reporting requirements—including disclosing detailed records of misconduct by foreign students—it will lose the ability to enroll any international students. pic.twitter.com/fVCPlnG7zQ

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) April 17, 2025

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Wednesday announced the cancelation of more than $2.7 million in grants to Harvard University amid tensions between the school and the Trump administration.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a Wednesday press release that Noem unveiled the discontinuation of two grants from the department to Harvard worth more than $2.7 million. DHS also noted in the press release that the secretary requested “detailed records on Harvard’s foreign student visa holders’ illegal and violent activities” in a letter.

“Harvard bending the knee to antisemitism — driven by its spineless leadership — fuels a cesspool of extremist riots and threatens our national security,” Noem said in the release.

“With anti-American, pro-Hamas ideology poisoning its campus and classrooms, Harvard’s position as a top institution of higher learning is a distant memory. America demands more from universities entrusted with taxpayer dollars,” she added.    

One major detail of this story is the fact that if Harvard fails to comply with DHS requirements, they may lose the ability to enroll foreign students. That is huge.     

Harvard depends on enrolling foreign students, many of whom pay full tuition price. This is hitting them where it hurts most. Right in the wallet.

GRTWT. 

About Those Students Arrested by the Department of Homeland Security

According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, 300 foreign students, such as Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia and Rumeysa Ozturk at Tufts, who are here in the United States on student visas, have now been arrested, and are threatened with deportation by the Department of Homeland Security. These 300 have been variously charged with a variety of offenses: providing support to Hamas, a designated terrorist group, both in person and on social media; calling for the destruction of the state of Israel (“From the river to the sea/Palestine shall be free”), urging violence against Jews everywhere (“Globalize the Intifada”), participating in campus violence, including physically harassing and attacking Jewish students, trying to shut down classes taught by Jewish professors, entering and vandalizing campus buildings, attacking campus police and janitorial staff, and much more. Douglas Murray discusses it all here.

All this gets especially messy because at the same time that portions of the right want to effect outrage at things which are essentially unimportant, the left is trying to focus on a much more important free-speech battle.

They believe that if someone supports a radical terrorist group or comes to the United States and tries to cause civil unrest or vandalism that they should somehow be protected by the First Amendment.

In recent days and weeks even some esteemed conservative writers have backed up this position.

As well as the case of Mahmoud Khalil, there is now also the case of Rumeysa Ozturk. Like Khalil, this person came into the US claiming to be a student. She came in on a student visa.

The Turkish-born student has now been detained. She seems — like Khalil — to have made a fundamental misunderstanding about what it means to come to the US as a student.

First of all she — like him — is not protected by the same laws that would protect an American citizen. She was not born in this country, is not a citizen of this country and was — in fact — a guest in this country.

But the left — and some on the right — are gearing up to make her their latest “free-speech martyr.” Yet even free speech for American citizens stop at the moment that you support the harassment of American students.