Boston

Students, professors and workers are confronting the Trump administration’s fascist crackdown at universities across the U.S. Since President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20, immigration officials have revoked at least 1,700 student visas. In the Boston area alone, hundreds of students at Harvard, Northeastern, Emerson, Berklee School of Music, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Tufts have already lost legal protection and face deportation. (tinyurl.com/5xnubmbt)

Over the past few months, authorities have kidnapped and detained dozens of students and university workers who have opposed the ongoing Zionist genocide in Palestine. On March 8, Homeland Security agents detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student organizer at Columbia University, separating him from his pregnant spouse, Noor Abdalla. Even though authorities did not charge Khalil with a crime, on April 11 a reactionary judge ruled his deportation could go forward. Khalil has appealed the decision and student activists, including members of Student Workers of Columbia (UAW Local 2710), continue to call for his release.

In Somerville, Massachusetts, on March 25, masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement thugs kidnapped Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts Ph.D. student. Öztürk remains incarcerated at an ICE concentration camp in Louisiana under threat of deportation.

A graduate student worker, Öztürk is a member of Service Employees Union (SEIU) Local 509 which has organized protests in solidarity with Öztürk — including a rally in Boston that drew hundreds of supporters and forced local Democratic Party politicians to condemn the kidnapping. SEIU continues to demand Özturk’s immediate release.

SEIU National President April Verrett said, “[Özturk’s] arrest, with no charges filed, is yet another chilling example of this administration’s efforts to use immigration actions to target and silence people merely for criticizing U.S. policy in the Middle East.” (uniglobalunion.org, April 17)

Working-class immigrants targeted

Edward Childs, a 50-year UNITE HERE Local 26 organizer of the Harvard Union of Dining Services, now retired, explained that this crackdown is ruling-class warfare targeting working-class immigrant and non-citizen students and university employees who have helped organize workers and lead demonstrations against the Zionist genocide in Palestine.

In an interview with Workers World newspaper, Childs said: “This is a direct attack on workers, on our children. And this is a political attack on unions and the consciousness of the working class. My union [UNITE HERE!] is 60% immigrants. They are going after all our communities: workers, foreign students, and TPS [Temporary Protected Status] workers and students on green cards.”

In a bid for direct control of U.S higher education, the Trump administration has threatened to cut federal funding to universities, remove their tax-exempt status and cancel the visas and green cards of their international students. Already the federal government has frozen over $2 billion in funding to the Harvard Corporation alone. Harvard has responded with a lawsuit, and, along with over 100 other universities, has denounced Trump’s intimidation tactics in an open letter.

Liberal pundits have fawned over the supposed “courage” these institutions have shown, but this narrative covers up the ways in which U.S universities continue to enable the repression they claim to be resisting. By censoring, intimidating and repressing student protests against the genocide in Palestine over the past two years, the administrations have laid the ground for the ICE terror campaign now underway.

The pretext of “campus antisemitism” the Trump administration is using was originally devised by university administrators to persecute students — many of them Jewish — for expressing solidarity with Palestine. University administrations and trustee boards may oppose a direct takeover of their multibillion dollar real estate and investment fiefdoms by Trump’s cronies, but they continue to enable his crackdown on students and workers on campus.

Even as Harvard’s President Alan Garber claims to defy Trump’s demands, he has promised to collaborate with the MAGA administration’s “Federal Antisemitism Taskforce” to quash pro-Palestine protests.

Universities such as Harvard have likewise abandoned their sham commitments to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) — a longtime target of racist MAGA smear campaigns. With scant ceremony, university administrations have begun disbanding the DEI programs they adopted in response to the Black-led protests and the demands of university workers and students that followed the 2020 police murder of George Floyd.

Just this week, Harvard replaced its DEI office with “A Center for Community and Campus Life.” In another show of complicity, university officials have turned over the records of international students to the Department of Homeland Security.

As WW previously reported, it is only union contracts with Harvard that continue to uphold protections for Black, Brown, women and gender-oppressed, disabled, LGBTQIA2S+ and TPS workers. (workers.org/2025/04/85196/)

University administrators have no right to abandon the concessions that workers and students forced them to make, Childs stressed,  “The unions, students and communities must be part of any negotiations on DEI — which they originally won from the administration.”

Fight the budget cuts!

Unions continue to resist the budget cuts that threaten potentially life-saving medical and environmental research. The latest round of cuts decreed by Trump merely takes to extremes a nationwide program of austerity administration. In March, Harvard announced a university-wide hiring freeze. Other universities have taken similar measures, including Northwestern, MIT and Columbia.

University cutbacks have singled out programs for mental health, vaccine research, and LGBTQIA2S+ welfare. The money that could have saved lives in working-class communities is instead poured by administrators into billion-dollar partnerships with the tech and weapons industries, which sell the technology and arms used to kill peoples resisting colonization overseas and to surveil Black, Brown, immigrant and Indigenous communities in the U.S.

While the federal government freezes over $100 million in National Institutes of Health grants, it has announced over $1 trillion in Pentagon spending. Childs explained: “The ruling class needs war to protect itself from competition — particularly from China — that would prevent Wall Street’s exploitation of the world. This is what Wall Street wants. But more than that, it’s what Wall Street needs to keep running.”

The austerity universities are embracing is a logical function of global capitalism. Although they enjoy “non-profit” status, research universities depend on imperialist extraction overseas and the labor of students, professors and workers — above all student visa-holders and other migrants. Universities, as capitalist institutions, can provide no protection from the rampant fascism they have enabled.

True resistance, Childs stressed, requires solidarity among faculty, students, university workers and affected working-class communities. Across the country labor organizers on campuses continue to lead the way, showing the possibilities of such resistance.

Demonstrators occupied Science Center Plaza on Harvard’s Cambridge campus on April 27. Unions in the coalition that organized the action include: UNITE HERE Local 26; the Harvard Undergraduate Workers Union; and the Harvard Graduate Students Union (UAW Local 5228).

Speakers vowed to protect immigrant workers and international students, demanded an end to the hiring freeze and freedom for Oztürk, Khalil and all other student political prisoners. An SEIU 32BJ shop steward and organizer at Harvard urged the university community “to stand in solidarity” with the immigrant workers who have [ensured] the safety and vibrancy of institutions like Harvard. (tinyurl.com/2zcj7ss5)

As the April 27 action shows, workers are leading the resistance — to both the fascist Trump administration and university officials who collaborate with it.

Childs said of students and university workers:  “They have to unite.  It’s their struggle. In order to win, that’s what has to happen.”