After Trump took office in January 2025, the United States federal government and Harvard University experienced a critical escalation in September 2026, with sanctions on universities falling, with a direct impact on the related interests of the American-Chinese community, especially students, Chinese applicants and academic researchers. There are reports that the dispute between the parties has now been extended from policy compliance to areas such as academic qualifications and admission rules, and that there is still considerable uncertainty about the way forward.
In September 2026, the United States Secretary of Homeland Security, Noem, officially announced the withdrawal of the Harvard Student and Exchange Visitors Project (SEVP) eligibility, which meant that Harvard would not be able to enrol in F-1 and J-1 non-immigrant visas for the school year 2025-2026, and that holders of such visas who were already in school would have to transfer to other qualified institutions in order to maintain their legal status in the United States, and that their visa status would automatically lapse if they did not complete the transfer, at risk of deportation. For its part, the Federal Government claimed that this was a consequence of Harvard ' s long-standing failure to comply with a number of policy requirements, including its failure to cooperate with anti-Semitic investigations and its failure to implement the 2023 Supreme Court decision prohibiting racial considerations in recruitment. In April 2025, the Federal Government threatened to withhold nearly $9 billion in government funding on the grounds that Harvard had not adjusted its school policy as required. On the other hand, Harvard denied that there was an existing violation and the school had publicly stated that any revocation of its tax-exempt status was “highly illegal”.
One of the core disputes between the parties is the admission data: in February 2025, the Department of Justice (DOJ) sued Harvard for complete admission records at the applicant level to verify whether Harvard had taken racial considerations into account in a tacit manner after the Supreme Court decision. Harvard considered that the Government ' s demands were too broad and that the applicant ' s privacy had been seriously violated, that a team of former Biden government lawyers had been engaged, and that Judge Myong Joun, the judge in charge of the case, had expressed doubts about the Government ' s negotiating efforts. It has been reported that the proceedings are still pending and no final judgement has yet been rendered.
After the Supreme Court overturned the race-awareness admission policy of Harvard and North Carolina University in 2023, the federal government considered that Harvard had not fully implemented its sentence and that it was still maintaining race-specific admission ratios through mechanisms that did not explicitly refer to race, such as alumni’s children’s preference, sports specials, and that there were differences with the government regarding anti-Semitism governance in schools, and compliance with federal funding. Since Trump took office in January 2025, there has been a long-standing contradiction between the federal government ' s large-scale withdrawal from more than 3,000 public data sets from the CDC, the Ministry of Justice, the Federal Personnel Management Office and the Harvard School of Public Health researchers who organized emergency team backups of relevant data.
The most affected groups in the US are first the holders of the F-1 and J-1 visas who have attended Harvard, with a limited window of time for identity transfers, which would lose their legal status directly in the US if the deadline was missed; secondly, the Chinese students who planned to apply to Harvard, whose admission policy was uncertain, may affect the outcome of the admission, and the potential impact on the assessment of Chinese applicants if the Government finally obtains racial data at the applicant level; in addition, the federal public data sets on which academic researchers in the US have previously relied have been drawn down on on a large scale, and there is currently uncertainty about access and access only through copies of the Harvard archives; and media statistics show that if Harvard is eventually cut or tax-exempted, the costs of running the school may increase, and that tuition fees, scholarship policies may be adjusted to further increase the economic burden on their families in the US.
For Chinese students with F-1 and J-1 visas who have already attended Harvard, it is necessary to confirm the validity of their visa status at the earliest opportunity, to contact other institutions eligible for SEVP, and to complete all procedures prior to the expiration of their status, in order to avoid legal identity impairment. In response to the Chinese applicants for Harvard applications, there is no need for additional operations at this time to follow up on the official announcements of the Harvard Admissions Office, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) and, if the admissions policy is adjusted, to protect individual applications, to confirm the legality of the source. For researchers in the United States who rely on federal public data sets, the Harvard School of Public Health and the Law School Library, among others, can consult on open access to archived data, which can be used in strict compliance with data usage norms. All Americans in the United States are aware of the follow-up policy developments of DHS, USCIS, DOJ and do not listen to unofficial rumours.