Trump administration takes aim at Harvard's international students and tax-exempt status

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration has escalated its ongoing battle with Harvard, threatening to block the university from enrolling international students as the president called for withdrawing Harvard’s tax-exempt status.

The moves raise the stakes of the showdown between the White House and the nation's oldest, wealthiest and arguably most prestigious university, which on Monday became the first to openly defy the administration’s demands related to activism on campus, antisemitism and diversity.

“I think Harvard's a disgrace,” President Donald Trump told reporters Thursday.

The Department of Homeland Security ordered Harvard on Tuesday to turn over “detailed records" of its foreign student visa holders ’ "illegal and violent activities” by April 30. It also said it was canceling two grants to the school totaling $2.7 million.

By taking action against international students and the school's tax status, the administration struck at two pillars of Harvard, where international students make up 27% of the campus, and the majority of the student body is in graduate school, often conducting globally prominent research. The school has risen to distinction by attracting the world’s top talent and large tax-deductible gifts from the country’s richest donors.

The federal government has already frozen more than $2 billion in grants and contracts to the Ivy League institution.

Leo Gerdén, a senior from Sweden, said many international students at Harvard are “scared of speaking up” because they feel attending the school has put a target on their back.

“All student visas right now at Harvard are at risk, and what the Trump administration is trying to do is divide us,” Gerdén said.

“Harvard without its international community is simply not Harvard,” added Gerdén, who is studying economics and government. If the institution were unable to admit people from abroad, “it would be incredibly tough for this university, for its students, for its academic community. So we should really fight with whatever means we have to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

The threat to Harvard’s ability to host international students comes as the Trump administration has quietly deleted the records and ended the legal status of international students at schools across the country. The students have been left with no clear recourse to regain their legal status in the U.S. They fear deportation.

At least 1,024 students at 160 colleges, universities and university systems have had their visas revoked or their legal status terminated since late March, according to an Associated Press review of university statements, correspondence with school officials and court records. Many students said they had no legal infractions aside from minor traffic violations.

Some of the government’s demands of Harvard touched directly on the campus activism that first triggered federal scrutiny of elite universities.

The Trump administration, in a letter on Friday, told Harvard to impose tougher discipline on protesters and to screen international students for those who are “hostile to the American values.”

It also called for broad leadership reforms at the university, changes to admissions policies and the removal of college recognition for some student clubs. The government also demanded Harvard audit its faculty and student body to ensure wide viewpoints in every department and, if necessary, diversify by admitting additional students and hiring new faculty.

On Monday, Harvard said it would not comply, citing the First Amendment. The following day, Trump took to his Truth Social platform, questioning whether the university should lose its tax-exempt status “if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’”

The White House suggested IRS scrutiny of Harvard’s tax status had already started before the president's social media post. Federal tax law prohibits senior members of the executive branch from requesting that an IRS employee conduct or terminate an audit or investigation.

“Any forthcoming actions by the IRS will be conducted independently of the President, and investigations into any institution’s violations of its tax status were initiated prior to the President’s TRUTH,” White House spokesman Harrison Fields said in an email Thursday.

However, a person familiar with the matter said the Treasury Department directed Andrew De Mello, the IRS acting chief counsel, to begin the process of revoking Harvard’s tax-exempt status shortly after Trump’s post. The person spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

Trump told reporters Thursday that a decision on revoking the university’s tax-exempt status hadn’t been made yet. “Tax-exempt status, it’s a privilege. It’s really a privilege. And it’s been abused by a lot more than Harvard," Trump said. "So we’ll see how it all works out. “

Tax exemptions enable universities to receive large donations from major funders who want to decrease their tax burdens, which was instrumental in helping Harvard amass the nation’s largest university endowment at $53 billion.

The Trump administration has already hampered Harvard's ability to fund its research and operations. After Harvard President Alan Garber said Monday the university would not bend to the government’s demands, the White House announced the freeze of more than $2.2 billion in multi-year grants and $60 million in contracts.

The hold on federal money for research marked the seventh time the administration has taken such a step at one of the nation’s most elite colleges. Republicans say the schools have allowed antisemitism and racial discrimination to fester in the form of pro-Palestinian protests and have promoted diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives contrary to the administration's directives.

Separately, the House Oversight Committee said Thursday that it would open an investigation into Harvard, accusing the school of a “lack of compliance with civil rights laws.”

In a statement Thursday, the university reiterated: "Harvard will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.” Harvard, the school said, “will continue to comply with the law and expect the Administration to do the same.”

Christopher Rufo, who has pioneered several GOP strategies related to education, said the Trump administration should use against Harvard the same tools it used during the Civil Rights Movement to force desegregation, including stripping nonprofit status. Rufo said Harvard has discriminated against white and Asian American students, citing events such as graduation celebrations and a 2021 theater performance “exclusively for Black-identifying audience members.”

“Cut the funding and watch the university implode,” he said Tuesday on social media.

Nonprofit status, which is required for donations to be tax deductible, is contingent on an organization following IRS rules governing lobbying, political campaign activity and annual reporting obligations, among other requirements.

While “it’s easy for a 501(c)(3) organization to maintain its tax exempt status," according to IRS publications, it "can be just as easy to lose it.”

Former Harvard President Larry Summers, who also served as Treasury secretary under former President Bill Clinton, decried the threat to remove Harvard's status.

“Any self-respecting Treasury Secretary would resign rather than have the Department be complicit in the weaponization of the IRS against a political adversary of the President,” he said on social media.

Trump’s campaign to force change at elite universities started at Columbia University, which initially agreed to several demands after the Trump administration froze $400 million of its federal funding.

But Columbia took a more emboldened tone after Harvard’s defiance. Columbia's acting president, Claire Shipman, said in a campus message Monday that some of the demands “are not subject to negotiation” and that she read of Harvard’s rejection with “great interest.”

Archon Fung, a professor of democracy at Harvard, called for “friends of academic freedom” and higher education to stand together.

“The government has an enormous amount of power — taxing power, investigatory power,” Fung said. “I don’t know who wins that struggle in the end.”

Associated Press education writers Jocelyn Gecker in San Francisco and Collin Binkley in Washington contributed to this report.

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Archon Fung, professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, addresses students, faculty and members of the Harvard University community rally, Thursday, April 17, 2025, in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

Students, faculty and members of the Harvard University community rally, Thursday, April 17, 2025, in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

Students, faculty and members of the Harvard University community rally, Thursday, April 17, 2025, in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

Archon Fung, professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, addresses students, faculty and members of the Harvard University community rally, Thursday, April 17, 2025, in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

Students, faculty and members of the Harvard University community rally, Thursday, April 17, 2025, in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

Students, faculty and members of the Harvard University community rally, Thursday, April 17, 2025, in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

A passer-by walks through a gate to the Harvard University campus, Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2024, in Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University President Claudine Gay resigned Tuesday amid plagiarism accusations and criticism over testimony at a congressional hearing where she was unable to say unequivocally that calls on campus for the genocide of Jews would violate the school's conduct policy. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

Visitors stop at the statue of John Harvard in Harvard Yard at Harvard University, Tuesday, April 15, 2025, in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

The Harvard University logo is displayed on a building at the school, Tuesday, April 15, 2025, in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

Spring buds appear on a tree near Eliot House, rear, at Harvard University, Tuesday, April 15, 2025, in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.

West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.

The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.

Decisions are expected by early summer.

President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.

Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.

“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”

She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.

Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.

She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.

Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.

“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.

Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.

The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.

About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.

"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”

But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.

“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”

Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”

“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.

One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.

Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”

The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.

The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.

The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.

The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.

If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.

“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)