The Trump administration escalated its feud with Harvard on Thursday, halting the university’s ability to enrol international students and ordering existing international students at the university to transfer or lose their legal status.
Homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, accused Harvard of “fostering violence, antisemitism and coordinating with the Chinese Communist party on its campus”.
Pippa Norris, a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, told the Guardian the move would “benefit Oxford and Cambridge and many other academic institutions … America, again, is going to have problems as a result.”
Previously, the Trump administration terminated a further $450m in grants to the university in May, after an earlier cancellation of $2.2bn in federal funding. In response to the federal cuts, the university – with an endowment of more than $53bn – filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration.
Trump halts Harvard’s ability to enrol international students
US media reported that the White House notified Harvard about its decision after ongoing correspondence regarding the “legality of a sprawling records request”.
Kristi Noem justified the decision by saying: “This action … is the unfortunate result of Harvard’s failure to comply with simple reporting requirements.” A Harvard spokesperson called the government’s action “unlawful” in a statement to the Guardian on Thursday.
US supreme court blocks religious charter school in split ruling
The US supreme court blocked a bid led by two Catholic dioceses to establish in Oklahoma the nation’s first taxpayer-funded religious charter school in a major case involving religious rights in American education that challenged the constitutional separation of church and state.
House passes Trump’s sweeping tax-cut bill
House Republicans won passage of a major bill in a 215-214 vote to enact Donald Trump’s tax and spending priorities while adding trillions of dollars to the US debt and potentially preventing millions of Americans from accessing federal safety net benefits. Trump cheered the vote passage and encouraged the Senate to pass the measure quickly.
The bill threatens to reverberate across the US by costing more than 830,000 jobs, raising energy bills for US households and threatening to unleash millions more tonnes of the planet-heating pollution that is causing the climate crisis, experts have warned.
RFK’s health report omits key facts
A new report led by the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, lays out a dark vision of American children’s health and calls for agencies to examine vaccines, ultra-processed foods, environmental chemicals, lack of exercise and “overmedicalization”. But the report ignores leading causes of death for children: firearms and motor vehicle crashes.
Trump administration seeks to end basic rights and protections for child immigrants in its custody
The Trump administration is trying to end a cornerstone immigration policy that limits the amount of time children can be detained by immigration officials. It also requires the government to provide children in its custody with adequate food, water and clean clothes.
In a court motion filed Thursday, the justice department argued that the Flores agreement should be “completely” terminated, claiming it has incentivized unauthorized border crossings and “prevented the federal government from effectively detaining and removing families”.
Whistleblower tried to warn Musk he was a Russia target
A former FBI counterintelligence agent turned whistleblower has claimed he tried to gain access to Elon Musk in 2022 to warn the billionaire that he was the target of a covert Russian campaign seeking to infiltrate his inner circle, possibly to gain access to sensitive information.
Johnathan Buma, who was arrested in March and is out on bail, claims in a new interview that efforts to target Musk were “intense.”
What else happened today:
Iran warned it would hold the US responsible for any Israeli attack on its nuclear sites, setting a tense backdrop for the fifth round of US-Iran nuclear talks.
The FDA’s advisory committee unanimously recommended that the newest vaccines for Covid should be updated to target a variant of strains currently on the rise, during a meeting on Thursday – the first since the Trump administration took office.
Catching up? Here’s what happened on 21 May 2025.
