Trump signs proclamation to restrict foreign student visas to Harvard | Trump administration

Donald Trump signed a proclamation to restrict foreign student visas at Harvard University, the White House said on Wednesday.

The prescription suspend the entry to the United States for the first six months of foreign nationals seeking to study or participate in exchange programs in Harvard. Trump said it would endanger national security to allow Harvard to continue to welcome foreign students.

The proclamation is the last attempt of the American president to suffocate the Ivy League school from an international pipeline which represents a quarter of the student body and a new climbing in the fight of the White House with the institution.

“I determined that the entry of the class of foreign nationals described above is detrimental to the interests of the United States because, in my opinion, the conduct of Harvard gave him a destination unsuitable for foreign students and researchers,” wrote Trump in order.

The proclamation of Trump also orders the US State Department to consider revoking the academic or exchange visas of any current Harvard student who meets the criteria of his proclamation.

Harvard in a statement entitled Proclamation of Trump “yet another stage of illegal reprisals taken by the administration in violation of the rights of the first Harvard amendment”.

“Harvard will continue to protect his international students.”

Trump distinguished Harvard's links with China as a reason to cut the university of foreign students. The proclamation said that Harvard was linked to research that “could advance the military modernization of China”.

The press release also said that Harvard was considered the largest “party school” for the bureaucrats of the Chinese Communist Party and noted that the daughter of Xi Jinping, a Chinese leader, attended in the early 2010s.

In the early 2000s, Harvard organized a “China Leaders in Development” program in collaboration with the Tsinghua University in Beijing for representatives of the Chinese government.

“I do not think it will benefit American universities,” said a Chinese undergraduate student with a study offer at Harvard for a master's degree from the next quarter that has asked for his name to be retained. “It provokes normal people, American students, a lot of anxiety.”

The Trump administration has embarked on a tense confrontation with Harvard, the oldest and richest university in the United States, freezing billions of dollars in grants and other funding and proposing to end its tax exemption status, which has aroused a series of legal challenges.

Harvard maintains that the administration retaliated against it for having refused to remedy its requests to control the governance of the school, the study program and the ideology of its teachers and students.

Harvard continued after the interior security secretary Kristi Noem, on May 22, announced that his service immediately revoked the student program certification and Harvard exchange visitors, which allows him to register foreign students.

His action was almost immediately temporarily blocked by a Boston court. On the eve of a hearing before her last week, the ministry changed CAP and said that he would rather dispute Harvard certification thanks to a longer administrative process.

Trump's order invokes a different legal authority from the previous decision of the Ministry of Internal Security on Wednesday. The legal justification for the ban, said Trump, are sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act, “which authorize the president to suspend the entry of any class of foreigners whose entry would be detrimental to the interests of the United States”.

Trump officials have repeatedly noted the challenges and sought -after new fronts to put Harvard pressure, reducing more than 2.6 billion dollars of research grants and moving to end all federal contracts with university. The last threat has targeted around 7,000 Harvard international students, who represent half of the registrations in certain Harvard higher schools.

“President Trump wants our establishments to have foreign students, but believes that foreign students should be people who may love our country,” said the White House in a proclamation information sheet.

The two -page directive on Wednesday said that Harvard had “demonstrated a story of foreign links and radicalism” and had “extended tangles with foreign opponents”, including China.

In addition to the sputum with Harvard, the White House has committed to “aggressively revoke” visas for Chinese students across the country, in particular those who have links with the CCP or in “critical fields”.