To Keep ICE off Campus, Harvard Must Listen to Its Grad Students

For over a year, students, workers, and community members have been asking the same question: whose side is the Harvard administration on?

When rumors of Immigration and Customs Enforcement presence circulated on college campuses last spring, administrators at peer institutions, including Yale and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, quickly put out public statements to dispel the false reports swirling in their communities.

Harvard did not.

In April 2025, a Harvard spokesperson declined to share whether the University would even notify affiliates of ICE’s presence on campus. In the months since, risks for noncitizen members of our community have only grown.

In the last year or so, Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident, was arrested without a warrant by ICE agents in his university-owned residence, while Columbia undergraduate Ellie Aghayeva was abducted from her college apartment after agents misrepresented themselves to enter the building.

Here in the Boston area, Tufts doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk was arrested near her home in neighboring Somerville, and Babson student Any Lucia López Belloza was wrongfully deported when traveling home to surprise her family for Thanksgiving. Harvard researcher Kseniia Petrova was detained as well and spent four months in detention after her visa was unlawfully cancelled for a customs violation.

The threat of ICE is no longer hypothetical. It has arrived at our doorstep. Yet Harvard refuses to commit to protecting all members of its community from this imminent threat.

In June 2025, the Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Auto Workers introduced a noncitizen worker rights article in contract negotiations that called on Harvard to safeguard I-9 forms from the government, fund legal counsel for its workers, and prevent ICE agents from entering non-public campus spaces without a valid judicial warrant. These are not radical asks. The University of California has maintained similar provisions governing ICE interactions for nearly a decade.

After ten months, Harvard finally responded to the article — only to strike out almost every single line detailing those protections.

Meanwhile, ICE’s rampage has only worsened, claiming the lives of at least 32 individuals in 2025 alone. Here at Harvard, noncitizen community members have borne the emotional and financial burden of the federal government’s persecution and had to contend with increasing legal fees without complete support from the University. HGSU-UAW leadership has reported that some graduate student workers are accumulating at least $14,000 in debt to keep immigration lawyers on retainer — more than half of a semester’s teaching pay. HGSU-UAW stretched its funds to disburse $170,000 in noncitizen assistance last year and still couldn’t cover $48,000 in eligible applications.

As the University has wallowed in passivity, undergraduate organizations have sprung into action to provide material support to noncitizen community members. In February 2026, the Monarch Coalition, an arts and advocacy coalition organizing for immigrant justice, for example, hosted a market and concert fundraiser for mutual aid for immigrant community members in Harvard, Cambridge, and Boston.

While students, despite their comparatively meager resources, are raising money to protect their peers and keep their community members out of detention, the University has yet to commit to keeping ICE off the campus we call home.

Now, Harvard’s graduate student workers are on strike, and noncitizen worker protections are among the core demands at the bargaining table. HGSU-UAW represents thousands of graduate student workers, research assistants, and undergraduate teaching and course assistants whose labor is central to everything Harvard claims to stand for. The union has already done the work of drafting meaningful protections. They have sat at the bargaining table for more than 15 months and explained exactly what noncitizen workers need from the University.

Harvard knows what meaningful support for noncitizens looks like — its graduate students wrote it down. All the administration has to do is accept the union’s proposal and commit to its protections.

Join the picket line and stand with your community. Tell Harvard whose side you’re on.

Melanie Garcia ’27 is a Government concentrator in Pforzheimer House. Sarahi Magdaleno ’28 is a Sociology concentrator in Currier House. Helen H. Mancini ’29 lives in Thayer Hall.