Trump’s Harvard Visa Threat Could Wipe Out School’s Sports Teams | EUROtoday

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — Some of Harvard’s sports activities groups can be just about worn out by a Trump administration resolution introduced on Thursday that might make the Ivy League faculty with the nation’s largest athletic program ineligible for worldwide scholar visas.

Seven of the eight rowers on the boys’s heavyweight crew workforce that simply received the Eastern Sprints title — and is headed to the nationwide championships — listing worldwide hometowns on the college’s web site.

Mick Thompson, the main scorer final season, and Jack Bar, who was a captain, are amongst a handful of Canadians on the boys’s hockey roster; 10 of the 13 members of the boys’s squash workforce and greater than half of the ladies’s soccer and golf rosters additionally listing international hometowns.

Harvard’s 42 varsity sports activities groups are essentially the most within the nation, and Sportico reported final month that 21% of the gamers on the college’s rosters for the 2024-25 seasons — or 196 out of 919 athletes — had worldwide hometowns.

The website famous that some could possibly be U.S. residents or inexperienced card holders who wouldn’t want one of many worldwide visas at challenge in an escalating combat premised by the administration’s assertions that the college failed to guard Jewish college students from antisemitism.

The Department of Homeland Security on Thursday revoked Harvard’s skill to enroll worldwide college students, saying the college has created an unsafe campus atmosphere by permitting “anti-American, pro-terrorist agitators” to assault Jewish college students on campus.

The transfer might drive as many as 6,800 international college students on the faculty exterior of Boston — greater than 1 / 4 of its complete enrollment — to switch or go away the nation.

Harvard known as the motion illegal and stated it’s working to offer steerage to college students. President Alan Garber, noting that he’s himself Jewish, stated final month after submitting a lawsuit to halt a federal funding freeze that the college “will continue to fight hate with the urgency it demands as we fully comply with our obligations under the law. That is not only our legal responsibility. It is our moral imperative.”

Harvard athletic director Erin McDermott beforehand declined an interview request from The Associated Press on the potential impression of the visa ban. A Harvard athletics spokesman on Thursday referred a request for remark to the college’s fundamental media info workplace, which didn’t instantly reply. The AP additionally requested remark from three Harvard coaches, who didn’t reply.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, a former Harvard hockey participant, declined to remark when contacted by the AP. Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat who performed basketball at Harvard, stated the athletes are amongst 85,000 international college students who come to the state to “study, conduct research, start businesses, and create jobs and innovations.”

“President Trump is punishing our students and hurting our economy, all as part of his agenda to silence anyone who disagrees with him,” she stated. “The only ones who benefit from Donald Trump’s actions are China and other countries who are already recruiting these students. It’s the exact opposite of America First.”