The U.S. government is threatening to revoke Harvard’s ability to enroll international students, a cohort that makes up at least 21% of the school’s athletes.
The Department of Homeland Security announced Wednesday that it would cancel two federal grants to the Ivy League school, and it demanded “detailed records” on what it described without specifics as “illegal and violent activities” by Harvard’s foreign student visa holders.
Failure to comply, the department said, would result in the school losing a government-issued certification that allows it to enroll international students.
It’s the latest escalation in an ongoing fight between President Donald Trump’s administration and the university, which began over the government’s push to limit activism on campus. On Monday, lawyers for the university told the government that Harvard “will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.” On Wednesday, Trump said on Truth Social that the school was “a joke,” had “lost its way” and “can no longer be considered even a decent place of learning.”
The government’s threats could impact Harvard’s athletic department, which sponsors 42 varsity sports—more than any other D-I school in the country. There are 919 individual students listed on Harvard’s public athletic rosters, and 196 of them have hometowns outside the U.S, according to a Sportico analysis. More than 50% of the athletes on the current women’s soccer, women’s golf and men’s heavyweight rowing squads are from outside the U.S.
It’s unclear how many of those foreign athletes are on international visas, and how many are U.S. citizens or green card holders. A spokesperson for Harvard athletics did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
According to the NCAA, approximately 25,000 international athletes compete across all three collegiate divisions each year. In the 2023–24 academic year, foreign athletes made up about 7% of all Division I competitors.
Men’s and women’s tennis consistently lead D-I sports in international representation, followed by men’s and women’s ice hockey, women’s golf and men’s soccer. For the 2023–24 academic year, roughly 38% of men’s tennis players, 35% of women’s tennis players, 23.3% of women’s golfers and 19.3% of men’s soccer players were international, according to NCAA data.
International participation in college sports had been steadily rising in the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2016, the NCAA reported 2,889 international first-year athletes in Division I programs—a number that grew to 3,639 by 2020. However, that figure declined slightly to 3,311 in 2021, likely reflecting the pandemic’s impact on global recruitment.
Trump has also announced his administration would freeze $2.2 billion in federal funding to Harvard and has proposed revoking the school’s tax-exempt status. Harvard has the largest endowment in the country—$53.2 billion at the end of the most recent fiscal year. That endowment could be next in the administration’s crosshairs, according to a report by Semafor.
“No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Harvard president Alan Garber wrote this week in an open letter to the Harvard campus.
Harvard entered this academic year having won 159 national team championships, including 2024 titles in women’s rugby, men’s and women’s fencing and men’s lightweight rowing. That women’s rugby team had at least eight international athletes, according to the roster on the school’s athletics page. The men’s lightweight rowing team had at least 12 and the fencing teams had one.
The Trump-Harvard feud is one of the many ways in which the administration’s sweeping federal changes could impact college sports. Others include tighter immigration policies, tariffs, a shift in the government’s interpretation of Title IX and the banning of transgender women from women’s sports.
Harvard’s international athlete percentage is similar to that of the school’s larger student population. Its most recent undergraduate class contained 1,647 students, with 18% of them coming from overseas.
