Seven more Harvard University student visas have been revoked, raising the total number at the university to 12 after five recent graduates lost theirs, the Harvard International Office said Thursday.
The officer released an update on the latest revocations on its “Visa status updates, Commencement guidance, and FAQs” page, which let international students know of a “Know Your Rights” seminar for Friday morning. The page was updated on Thursday.
“We want to assure you that we continue to monitor the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Student Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) daily,” the international office stated.
Among the 12 revocations, seven students and five recent graduates had their visas terminated, the office said.
It was through the SEVIS system, like with other Massachusetts universities seeing students lose their visas, that Harvard saw that the number of revocations had grown, according to the statement.
“To protect their privacy, the university cannot provide the identity of the individuals,” the office said. “We do not intend to provide any nonpublic access or sensitive information to any external party absent a legal directive to do so. We are not aware of the details of the revocations or the reasons for them, but we understand these actions continue to take place at other institutions across the country.”
At least eleven higher education institutions in Massachusetts have seen their visas revoked in recent weeks.
Those institutions include Tufts University, Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the University of Massachusetts Boston, Northeastern University, Emerson College, Boston University, Berklee College of Music, Bridgewater State University and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
On Thursday, 12 international students attending Worcester’s Clark University had their visas revoked by federal authorities.
Clark is also among 85 other higher education institutions and organizations throughout the United States that signed an amicus brief in AAUP v. Rubio — a case challenging the federal government’s revocation of visas and detentions of non-citizen students and scholars.
One of the first public revocations occurred when Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk was arrested on March 25 by six masked federal immigration agents in Somerville in apparent retaliation to an op-ed article she co-authored in support of the Palestinians in Gaza in the school’s newspaper in 2024.
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