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{shortcode-a95785d57ce9a7cfa949e6c6b6152733efd9f754} had barely set up his Harvard email when he got an interview request from The Crimson.

The Nepali native, now a Harvard freshman, had applied for his visa two months earlier and was waiting to hear if it had been accepted. Any other summer, the snail-pace of governmental affairs likely would not have been newsworthy. But this year, President Donald J. Trump was going head-to-head with B’s future school. When the Department of Homeland Security revoked Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor program in May, Harvard sued the Trump administration. Trump threw back a proclamation banning travelers on Harvard-sponsored visas from entering the country.

B.’s future — like that of Harvard’s nearly 6,800 international students — was in limbo.

During a press conference in June, Trump justified his administration’s actions as patriotic. “We have people who want to go to Harvard and other schools, they can’t get in because we have foreign students there,” he said. He denounced “radicalized lunatics” and “troublemakers” — a reference to international students involved in pro-Palestinian activism. At an earlier press conference, he also proposed capping Harvard’s international student population at 15% of the student body, nearly half the current enrollment percentage.

We wanted to talk personally with some of the individuals who make up this statistic, whose visa struggles and customs fears have dominated headlines. The tug-of-war between the federal government and the University has continued into the fall, even as these students begin the daily business of Harvard life.

Across eight profiles — spanning class years, countries, and concentrations — no single, shared narrative emerged.

A freshman debate champion wakes up to news of his peers marching the streets of Nepal. A trio of friends become high-profile activists. A first-year athlete from Turkey explains the difficulties of obtaining a visa to American students in her entryway. A junior dreams of returning to New Delhi. A Canadian sophomore, who grew up near the American border, reacts with ambivalence. A sophomore from Jakarta searches for the America she idealized as a child.

Missing from our account, however, are the international students who ultimately decided not to risk unwanted scrutiny from the Trump administration by telling their stories. As immigrants with legal status, green cards, and visas are arrested, detained, and deported across the country, many are taking extraordinary precautions, including deleting social media accounts and hesitating to speak on record to the press.

Four students who originally agreed to interviews later dropped out, citing busy schedules, discomfort with discussing politics, and concerns over reiterating differences with their American peers. Others did not reply to interview requests or said no, citing fatigue over the issue, worries about future retaliation, and previous difficulties with visa approvals. (The Crimson agreed to refer to three of the students eventually profiled by their first initial.)

America’s long-standing reputation as the land of opportunity draws hundreds of thousands of the world’s “best and brightest” to its universities every year. And Harvard itself seems to have retained its appeal, with the proportion of international freshmen remaining relatively steady, according to Harvard’s numbers from late May.

But what does it mean for students to build a life in a country whose government does not want them there?

An Ocean Away, Looking Back

By Megha Kemka

{shortcode-be29865d8a9c7908fa05930b7f2d42574eaa573c}n the end, B.’s journey from Kathmandu to Boston Logan took him 48 hours, 25 minutes, and 43 seconds. He knows because he timed it, and then took a screenshot of his stopwatch.

He hadn’t booked his flight until mid-August, because his study abroad permit hadn’t been approved until then. He paid around 180,000 Nepalese rupees, more than $1200, for his Nepal-South Korea-Minneapolis-Boston ticket, which featured a surprise detour to Salt Lake City due to a passenger’s heart attack.

“They never confirmed,” clarifies B., a debater in high school, “whether it was a heart attack or a cardiac arrest.”

B. narrates his flight saga with the same sanguine good humor he applies to nearly everything. He is one of a handful of Nepali students at Harvard, and one of over 250 freshmen who accepted their offers despite the uncertainty over whether they would be allowed to attend. He joined an admitted international student WhatsApp group that was mainly dedicated to visa inquiries and spent his pre-frosh orientation alternating between parties and questions about immigration enforcement. This is the only Harvard experience he knows.

During his senior year of high school — between juggling A-level exams, international debate tournaments, two internships, and a community service project — B. applied to 32 schools in the U.S., China, and Abu Dhabi.

He had always been determined to study outside of Nepal; higher education there, he says, is unreliable and often obsolete. “Sometimes a four-year degree takes like 10 years to finish,” he says, “because teachers leave, or politics interferes with education. Which is ironical.”

He applied early action to Princeton, and though he tried to stay up until decisions came out at 4:45 a.m., he fell asleep for an hour. Bad luck — he was deferred. When regular decision arrived, he called his friends on Discord so they could open the results together. His college counselor stayed up all night praying, and his grandmother did a puja, a Hindu worship ritual, for him. Having successfully made it through the night, he opened the decisions in alphabetical order: Brown and Cornell (accepted), Columbia and Dartmouth (waitlisted), and then, at last, Harvard.

By then, his grandmother was awake. He chose to move in with her when his grandfather passed, he says over dinner at El Jefe’s, one of his favorite Harvard Square spots. When he told her about Princeton, he says, “she couldn’t understand. She just knew it was a U.S. college. And then I said I got into Harvard, and she was like, ‘Oh wow, congratulations.’”

He made his decision to accept the offer the next day. The College had given him the best aid package, and Harvard, at the end of the day, was Harvard.

So far, the school has delivered. He’s filled his first two months on campus with three p-set classes, a freshman seminar, an all-nighter, and a Taco Bell trial run (verdict: good, but not better than Jefe’s). He rarely spends time in his sparse Grays dorm. His desk is totally bare save for a Platform Nine and Three-Quarters sign, a lamp, and a huge Nepali flag — he had to take a lot out of his suitcase to make the weight limit. Even the lamp, he says, was a waste. He offers up a rule for freshman life: don’t buy anything for your room until you know how often you’ll be there.

His bedroom is similarly bare, though the mass of clothes hanging from the bedframe seems at odds with his zero-unread-email inbox and typeface-like handwriting. He has built the wall of fabric so that he doesn’t wake his roommate with the light from his phone when he gets in from a movie night at 4 a.m.

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When asked whether being international has been a source of stress since getting to campus, B. is as pragmatic as ever. He has taken the political situation in stride, much like the Boston traffic he had been warned about — “I don’t know what they were saying, Boston drivers are crazy? They’re not.”

But his understated tone vanishes when he talks about developments back home. In early September, youth-led anti-government protests broke out in Kathmandu and other cities. B. has woken up some mornings to news of his peers’ blood in the streets, as crackdowns on the demonstrations led to dozens of deaths. One night, he was up at 2 a.m. getting updates from friends. “I know people who were on the street that day,” he says.

Meanwhile, a Discord server “had turned into a community of people who were saying, ‘We should make this guy the prime minister.’ Because there were no politicians. They all fled the country.” The next day, the channel “Youth Against Corruption” held a virtual vote to nominate Sushila Karki, Nepal’s former chief justice, as the next prime minister of Nepal.

B.’s next four years are still ahead of him, and he’s determined to try everything. He’ll continue debating, but doesn’t want to be “stuck” in his high school activities. He’s trying out clubs from Open Data Project to race car building to poker and thinking about studying engineering. He hasn’t yet been sorted into a House, attended his first Harvard-Yale, or fulfilled his language requirement, because this year they didn’t offer a test in Nepali. By the time he graduates in 2029, Trump’s second term will be over.

“I don’t feel the need to rush into things right now,” he says. And as invested as he is about everything happening in Nepal, he’s grateful he’s on this side of the ocean.

“Imagine this had happened one month ahead,” he says. “The airport is closed, by the way. If I did not get to come here because of it, that would be the last straw.”

Stand Up, Harvard!

By Megha Kemka and Christopher Schwarting

{shortcode-24643cedbe14221289878261864001a8ceef067a}n April 12, an overcast sky stretched above the soaked grass in Cambridge Common. Here, 500 Harvard students, professors, and neighbors assembled in rain coats and ponchos, holding cardboard posters and miniature American flags They convened despite the April showers with one conviction: Harvard must be persuaded that resisting President Trump is the only path forward.

The rally, organized by Harvard’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors and the Cambridge City Council, included more than a dozen speakers. Among them were Karl N. Molden ’27 and Abdullah Shahid Sial ’27, who had recently co-founded Harvard Students for Freedom to highlight “the human impact of the Trump administration’s policies on students.”

Karl, Sial, and Alfred F.B. Williamson ’28 are part of a small group of international students who have made the deliberate decision to publicly voice their disagreement with the Trump administration. In the process, they have become the de facto spokespeople for the international student experience — appearing behind megaphones at student rallies, discussing the threat of authoritarianism in New York Times profiles, and speaking to foreign language networks.

{shortcode-0294e72bfa2ef217956b00f147737cacdc556a2d}arl N. Molden ’27 is from Austria. He has a brother called Leopold (“a very old Austrian name,” he says), people-watches in courtyards to recreate a Viennese coffee house ambience, and says he intimately knows the stakes of identifying authoritarianism. Given the fresh wound of 20th-century European fascism, his high-school history courses were a step-by-step look at the “authoritarian playbook.”

Karl also draws inspiration from his grandfather — a resistance fighter against the Nazis, whose story taught him that “once the curtains of democracy are falling, shit goes down” — and a French comic book series.

“If you’ve read Asterix and Obelix,” he says, “it’s the Gallic village defending itself against the Roman Empire.”

For Karl, the village is Harvard: a community of people supporting each other in the face of an existential threat. At the center of this village is Lowell House, where he spends most of his time when not in classes, Students for Freedom meetings, or interviews with major news publications. He calls it “the only castle in America.”

Karl’s village metaphor is not a Crimson-exclusive tidbit — he first told it to a reporter from Der Spiegel, a German news magazine. Since last semester, Karl, co-founder of Students for Freedom, has become a regular among preeminent news outlets in both the U.S. and Europe. This semester, a professor knew who he was before he even got to class.

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Though Karl is practiced with interviews, the way he talks doesn’t change much once he’s on the record. He speaks eloquently and at length about the dangers of democratic backsliding, but also historical books he loves, life in Vienna, and the modern-day parallels of the Trump administration and the Peloponnesian War.

At Harvard, Karl studies Government and Classics. Campus is a far cry from the work-life balance of Austria — here, there is “no such thing as a weekend,” and you live and work and play alongside your classmates. Still, he finds ways to bring his best Austrian life here. He loves making music with his roommates, reminiscent of the guitar concerts he put on with his dad during the Covid-19 pandemic. He’s seen Bob Dylan in concert five times: thrice back home and twice here. This summer, he’s hoping to make a documentary about the Baltic response to the war in Ukraine with his friend Alfred.

Karl’s best-case scenario is that Harvard totally rejects all of Trump’s demands and serves as an inspiration for the rest of American higher education to do likewise. His worst case is that Harvard begins to make concessions, that no Democratic regime comes to power in 2028, and that he gets deported to Austria — where he will receive a free high-quality education.

“If I keep speaking out and then I have to go back to Europe,” he says, “at least I can.”

Many Harvard students, he explains, are “risk-averse” and concerned about their futures. But he also acknowledges that for students like his Pakistani best friend Sial, public dissent can have heavier consequences. “It’s gonna be really hard to find anything even remotely close to Harvard in his home country.”

{shortcode-21cc3534b02e5a90dd1b6e61be0fe28423896a7e}bdullah Shahid Sial ’27 has been called brave by dozens of peers and strangers, but it’s a reputation he neither asked for nor expected. “I think that was the bare minimum,” he says of his open criticisms of the Trump administration. “When I started, these messages, these random emails and people texting my number — I didn’t see myself in the same light as they saw me.”

Yet he harbors no ill will towards students — American or international — who have been hesitant to speak or even apathetic about the political situation. “I don’t think anyone has any obligation,” he says. Many people, he knows, came to Harvard for the rigorous education and unparalleled opportunities, to be the best in their chosen field. Being political activists was never part of their plan.

For himself, though, he applies a different standard. He’s one of the presidents of the Harvard Undergraduate Association, started attending protests in Pakistan at age 16, and believes that “‘something is wrong’ should be very easy to say.”

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After Harvard, Sial wants to go to graduate school for economics so that he can eventually move back to and work to improve lives in his home country. He plans to take a gap year after junior year to work as a waiter in Pakistan and improve his Punjabi so that he can “understand the lives of the people I want to serve.”

So speaking out today — when he’s “protected by perhaps the wealthiest and most influential institution in the entire world” — is an obvious necessity.

“If I fold my knees now,” he says, “they will definitely fall by themselves when times are tougher.”

Sial is a member of a large extended family; his father was the only one of eight siblings to come to Lahore, but Sial spent Eids and many other holidays with over thirty people at his ancestral home in Shaher Sultan. “It’s as if you have more than two parents,” he says. “All of us are pretty involved in each other’s lives.”

He was the first in his family to leave Pakistan and the first to obtain an undergraduate degree, so he saw his admission to Harvard as a “big communal win” for everyone. Now, one of his younger sisters is a freshman at the University of Toronto, and many of his cousins want to “give it a shot of applying to a place in the U.S. Let’s see for whom it works and who it doesn’t.”

Even at Harvard, Sial’s commitments are about bringing people together: he is on the Mather House Committee and tries to get to know everyone in his dining hall, loves when people break their fasts together during Ramadan, and led the Harvard Pakistan Trek for two years. Though he no longer dreams of a professional career in cricket, he still plays with Harvard’s club team. They just defeated Oxford over the summer.

Sial is someone who cares deeply about Harvard (he calls it “the best place in the world”), his House, and his country; political organizing is his vocation. Meanwhile, he is studying Applied Mathematics and Economics, because he loves those subjects — and doesn’t want an academic study of politics to “compromise on why I find all of this really, really interesting.”

And if it doesn’t work out? If Sial goes home to serve his people, and America doesn’t let him back in? “I also perceive of myself as having a lot of dignity,” he says. “If they don’t want me here, then it’s a pity.”

{shortcode-21cc3534b02e5a90dd1b6e61be0fe28423896a7e}s Karl and Sial took center stage last April, Alfred F.B. Williamson ’28 watched them. From that moment, he knew “deep down that they were doing the right thing.” He’d join them at a rally a few weeks later.

Now, Alfred stands alongside them. On a Saturday afternoon this past September, he stood before a crowd in the Science Center Plaza for the first Students for Freedom rally of the academic year. Standing atop the rocks of Tanner Fountain, he told a story about Giorgio Levi Della Vida, an Italian linguist who refused to sign an oath of loyalty to the fascist Mussolini regime in 1931. For his resilience, the academic was exiled from his university.

Alfred makes use of many anecdotes like these. He’s a passionate storyteller — helped by the charm of a Welsh accent. Before joining the duo, Alfred contacted Karl, offering to organize or speak at a protest. He then spoke to Sial, who, over dinner, told him frankly about the risks of speaking out.

“He said to me: ‘There’s always going to be consequences,’” Alfred recalls, later explaining, “There’s always going to be something at stake, whether it’s your job, your family, your education.

“It’s never going to be safe,” he adds. “So either you make a decision to stand up for what you believe in, or you don’t do it.” Alfred decided he wanted to speak up. In doing so, he began straddling the line between peer and organizer.

Today, the Physics and Government double concentrator has become well-acquainted with both the literal and proverbial microphone. His springtime speech brought a call from The New York Times; soon after, several other media outlets sought his perspective on international students at Harvard.

Alfred’s interest in the “project” of democracy predates the Trump administration’s crackdown. While in high school, he became involved in the European Forum Alpbach, a conference convening global leaders to discuss the future of Europe. The Forum takes its roots from Nazi resistance fighters. There, he met Karl, and they became close friends. After Karl was accepted to Harvard, he encouraged Alfred, then a STEM-focused rower, to apply too.

The similarities don’t end there. Like Karl, Alfred sees the threats of authoritarianism as personal, entangling his family history. Born in Wales to a Welsh father and Danish mother, he grew up listening to stories about his maternal great-grandparents, who lived in Denmark under Nazi occupation. Similarly, his paternal grandfather fought against the Nazis in the British Army while his grandmother was evacuated to the British countryside.

Now, Alfred carries on that project. But speaking out can be difficult and tiresome.

“All this media attention is kind of surreal. I don’t know if I’ve quite processed it or thought too much about it. I do it and then get on with life,” he says. “There was a period where I thought this was actually very surreal — this idea of millions of people listening to what you say. There’s a lot of pressure to say the right things, not to mischaracterize the situation.”

He knows there are negative comments about him out there, but he doesn’t actively seek them out. Sitting outside Lehman Hall, he leans in, finger interlocked. “It creates this atmosphere of self-doubt,” he says. “You have to trust you’re doing the right thing, saying the right thing.”

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Having been visibly critical of the administration, Alfred wondered how his re-entry into the country would go. Yet, when he returned to campus in August to serve as a First-Year International Program leader, he encountered no obstacles as he cleared customs at Boston Logan Airport. “It might’ve been my easiest entry ever,” Alfred recalls.

But in between bites at El Jefe’s — a favorite spot — and pool at the table three doors from his Eliot House dorm, he reveals that he’s worried. The ongoing threat to political freedom “is not in people’s heads” as much as it should be. Americans, he warns, might “not be ready” for the dangers that await them.

“America is sleepwalking,” he says. Sleepwalking towards authoritarianism.

New Beginnings in Boston

By Megha Kemka and Aurora J.B. Sousanis

{shortcode-be29865d8a9c7908fa05930b7f2d42574eaa573c}n simplest terms, D. says she might be at Harvard because of bugs.

The freshman’s laughter carries through the Harvard dining hall as she describes her lifelong fascination with insects. Throughout high school, D. volunteered at a local university studying genetic polymorphisms in Isophya rizeensis, a type of cricket endemic to northern Turkey. She was part of a bee-keeping club, handing out jars of honey as prizes for school competitions. Her pets were a bushel of stick insects that she bought from a Turkish breeder online. “I saw someone having a stick bug on TikTok,” she says. “And I was like ‘Why can’t I?’”

Over winter break, D. plans to return to Istanbul and permanently enshrine her love of bugs with a tattoo of a bee.

In the meantime, D. is pursuing athletics and making friends at Harvard with the same enthusiasm she applies to bugs. But her campus experience has been shaped by politics from the very beginning, and — sitting in Adams, pointing out the other Turkish students she sees — she sometimes wonders if her American peers understand the full extent of the international experience.

D. long intended to leave Turkey and shifted her efforts towards attending a university abroad. Her high school, Robert College of Istanbul, is among the most competitive in the country and one of the few offering the courses required to get a diploma recognized by U.S. colleges. The education system in Turkey is lacking, she says. “The politics are not going well.”

Her dedication paid off: D. got into her dream school, Harvard. But as with many of her current peers, D.’s visa application was denied throughout July and into August. Every day, she called or emailed the visa office only to learn that nothing could be done; every day, her portal showed ‘refused.’ Due to the summer uncertainty, Harvard revised its admissions policies to allow incoming freshmen to simultaneously accept an offer to a non-American institution.

So two weeks before she stepped foot inside her Harvard freshman dorm, D. still thought she was going to Oxford. But one August morning, the call came — her visa had been issued.

“To be honest,” she says, grinning, “I can’t really lock in. Because I’m still happy that I made it, made it here.”

The first thing D. did when she arrived in Boston was send her friends a video of herself trying Raising Canes and Crumbl Cookies. “It’s a thing on international TikTok,” she laughs. “There are literally ASMRs.” As with most American fast food, she found it both tastier and heavier than the equivalent options in Istanbul. What substances does American McDonald’s put in their burgers to “make it taste that good?” she wonders aloud.

Overall, the transition to Harvard life has been fairly smooth for D. “I think I was more stressed before coming here than now,” she says. At times, she finds herself having to explain the travails of visa applications and international travel to American peers. Since so many international students ultimately made it to campus, she explains, some people don’t realize the severity of the situation.

As a whole, D. talks about being an international student with optimism. Her accent has been a “good conversation starter” — as have her 13 piercings. She says there are four other Turkish international students in her year at Harvard — one from her high school and two who attended an international high school — and that the Turkish upperclassmen have become good friends, too. She hasn’t felt too many “culture shocks,” other than the challenge of talking in English all the time, and continues to enjoy speaking Turkish with the small group who understand it.

“It's a funny mini-code language,” she says, smiling.

In addition to her Turkish friends, D. says she’s “really, really, enjoying the people” at Harvard. She likes how “everyone has their own thing in a way,” and hopes to find hers in the sports community. She joined Harvard’s club volleyball team, successfully auditioned for Harvard’s Expressions Dance Company, and is in the process of walking onto the lightweight rowing team.

“I just wanted to find a group of people that are working for the same thing,” she says, adding that she hopes to replicate the friendships made through playing on her high school’s volleyball team back home.

Long-term, she’s excited to take more specialized classes towards her S.B. in bioengineering. For now, though, D. says she hasn’t been studying much and has been “rolling through whatever the wind takes me.” Though most of her classes are STEM-focused, she chose to take the African Spirituality Gen Ed in the hopes of broadening her understanding of theology. She really enjoyed the Islam-focused religion classes mandated by the Turkish government, she says, but hopes to explore a broader “worldview” of religion in the States.

Meanwhile, she wonders whether she will stay in the U.S. or move closer to home after school, whether or not she should pursue grad school, and if it’s ethical for humans to keep pets at all.

Definitely no more stick bugs, though, she confirms over text. “I don’t think my roommate would like that.”

Rigid Plans, Uncertain Times

By Aurora J.B. Sousanis

{shortcode-471488a28f98f055581c84571bdaf7c7378242a3}itting on his bed, the flag of India pinned up behind him, Ashmit Singh ’27 looks over to his phone buzzing on the side table. His mom is calling.

“I talk to my mom every day,” says Ashmit, as he drafts a text saying he’ll call her back in an hour. “With my mom it’s like we’re talking for hours about everything going on in our lives.” He calls her his “pillar.”

Between questions, Ashmit runs his hands through his hair and adjusts his wire-frame glasses, revealing a tattoo on his bicep. The lower half of the tattoo, he explains, honors his late uncle, who died in the Kargil War fighting for India in 2001. The top half is a symbol of the Hindu god, Shiva, also known as the Destroyer. In Ashmit’s favorite portrayals of the god, he’s dedicated to his family and mellow until he must take action.

Shiva also smokes weed, adds Ashmit sheepishly.

Ashmit — who studies Economics and Sociology, with a language citation in modern standard Arabic — says that while he has enjoyed his education at Harvard, he plans to return to New Delhi and his family when it’s over. He feels indebted to his country, and, for several generations, his family has worked in the Indian government or served in the army. He loves the U.S., he says, but his fate is to follow in his family’s footsteps. And it always has been.

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“If I kind of deviate from that line after getting this amazing opportunity to learn, I would be betraying what my family has stood for,” says Ashmit. “And that is something that’s not acceptable.”

Early in his high school career, Ashmit decided he would study in the U.S. — and, in particular, at Harvard. For two years, his classmates laughed at his self-assurance, knowing him as a fun, “go-lucky” guy who went to more parties than classes. But Ashmit says it didn’t shake him. He studied American students who were accepted into Harvard and replicated what they had done in high school, taking on leadership roles in clubs, sports, and debate.

Though Ashmit was confident, his parents were not. No one in his immediate family had studied in the U.S. before, and every other successful applicant they knew used expensive college consultants that Ashmit’s family could not afford. And in the best-case scenario that Ashmit did get in somewhere, they worried they wouldn’t be able to pay tuition.

But when it came time to apply to colleges, Ashmit only sent one application: to America’s top university.

“It was not confidence; it was stupidity, looking back,” says Ashmit, laughing and pushing his hair back. But his wager paid off: Ashmit was accepted, with full financial aid. While international students in the U.S. are not able to receive federal aid, Harvard has its own job and need-based scholarship funds that allow them to give aid to non-American students on the same basis as American ones.

On campus, those who know Ashmit know that he is a big personality. His booming voice easily fills a room, and he’s not one to shy away from provocation, often looking for buttons to press to elicit reactions. His friends say it is all in good fun. He himself acknowledges that he has a certain “persona” that he likes to put on, which he recognizes may annoy or “trigger” some people. But for Ashmit, what other people think about him has never been cause for too much concern.

On campus, Ashmit works two student jobs as a tour guide and a course assistant for a corporate finance class. He’s discovered a love of teaching, and the two jobs have allowed him to become financially independent from his parents — an achievement he says would not have been possible in India. He also believes his classes encourage him to think for himself, in a way that an Indian university, typically focused on vocational training, would not.

But Ashmit’s college acceptance was only the first step in a very rigid future plan: he would study at Harvard for four years, work in the U.S. post-grad for an additional two to three, and then move back home to India and work to better his country.

“I've always felt at home in India,” he says. “In the U.S., I’ve always felt like a guest, and I don’t want to overstay that welcome.”

Because he had always planned to return to India, Ashmit says he wasn’t as affected as his international peers were when Trump began to threaten student visas. “Being sent back early might bum me out a bit, but it wouldn’t be something I would lose too much sleep over,” he says.

As a result, Ashmit has refused to compromise in the same ways other international students have. He has maintained his social media accounts, and this summer, he returned home for two weeks.

Ashmit also says that, on the whole, he respects that Trump is an elected official and does not feel like it is his place as a “guest” to criticize a representative elected by the majority of Americans. In India, he explains, one doesn’t “go against the federal government and win.” While that experience, he says, may be coloring his perspective on the U.S. government, he feels that focusing on Harvard’s response will only stress him and other international students out.

At the moment, he says, international students can do very little about their situation — a difficult truth for Harvard students, who “need to have everything figured out.”

“Sometimes, shit sucks,” he says with a shrug. “You can’t do anything about it.”

But one friend, I. — an international student from Greece — says she saw that Trump’s attacks on student visas over the summer shook Ashmit, too.

“He has also been trying to navigate that very rigid plan that he seemed to have. And I have seen him go from this person who is aware of the uncertainty but is kind of chill and optimistic to saying, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do’ for the first time,” she explains. Ashmit says that he’s currently most concerned about the uncertainty of post-grad jobs — where exactly to work after school and what exactly that work will be.

Over the summer, Ashmit received a Harvard stipend to conduct community service for a Florida city council. He saw it as an opportunity to give back to his temporary country. And, surrounded by students from diverse backgrounds and volunteers working to better a city that was not their own, Ashmit saw a microcosm of the United States.

“America was built on immigration. It’s a very commonly known fact. I’m totally fine with stopping immigration if you think that's best for the country,” says Ashmit. “But I don’t think you can deny that a lot of good immigrants, a lot of people who have come from other countries, have done a lot.”

Somewhere in Between

By Christopher Schwarting and Aurora J.B. Sousanis

{shortcode-16f8ced088e32bb2d90bab8d4861646b946d7fa0}lla V. Ricketts ’28 grew up in the suburbs of Vancouver, Canada, just one hour away from the American border. She smiles when she recounts her life at home with her parents and younger brother, going on hikes and lake trips and enjoying seafood together.

“It’s very mellow, a little bit more mellow on the West Coast than here on the East Coast,” she says.

The Adams House sophomore jokes about the idiosyncrasies of American life — like figuring out the Dunkin’ equivalent of her Tim Hortons order, for example. But when the federal government began investigating international students last spring, Ella found she occupied a social middle ground. The cultural similarities of Canada and the U.S. blurred the gravity of her situation for her peers when, in reality, she and the other internationals faced the same precarious status.

“I’m this in-between. I’m my own separate category,” Ella says. “It’s Americans, Canadians, internationals in a lot of students’ minds. And I’ve gotten that from American students and international students alike.”

Ella speaks with the Canadian “aboat” (not about) as she describes her life in the two countries while sitting in the Lower Common Room of Adams House. Once a three-varsity sport athlete, she competed for Canada in netball at the Commonwealth Youth Games in Trinidad and Tobago.

Ella came to Harvard for its reputation in public service and the study of government and speaks the languages of the political polyglot — she is perpetually ready with statistics, poll results, and the latest pulse on communities back home and in Boston. She’s become deeply versed in the American political sphere, making a point to read the news “every day,” and spends the majority of her time outside of classes working with the Model United Nations team, the Institute of Politics, and the Harvard Public Opinion Project. Later this month, she’ll go with HPOP to New York City to talk with campaign managers and voters ahead of the mayoral election.

This fall, Ella officially declared Government as her concentration. She says her work with the IOP has helped her gain confidence speaking her mind on politics and contentious issues. And because she now has the skills to do it, she feels it’s her duty to “stand up or speak out when I feel that a situation isn’t right.”

It’s why she agreed to be profiled.

“It made me very, very nervous to say anything in the first place,” says Ella. “But I’m just trying to stick to my principles as much as I can.”

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When the Trump administration first threatened the status of international students, the uncertainty of Ella’s future at Harvard made it difficult to focus on academics. While doing psets for Math MB: “Introduction to Functions and Calculus II,” she wondered if she would still be in the country by the exam.

She struggled to iron out concrete summer plans, initially securing an internship in Wisconsin to work on energy optimization policy. Without any clarity on her visa, she had to prepare for the worst. She emailed her supervisor with a note, essentially saying: “I’m not really sure if I’m going to be able to come here because I don’t know if I’m going to have status in like a week from now. Just keep that in mind, that you might not have an intern this summer.”

Canada’s relationship with the U.S. has soured during Ella’s time at Harvard. . Back in December, Trump suggested — and has since continued to propose — that Canada should enter as America’s 51st state. “Canada is not for sale,” said Canadian prime minister Mark Carney ’87 in May, while promising to “stand up” to Trump.

At home, Ella says, Canadians feel betrayed by Trump’s attacks, describing the close relationship the countries had as “almost like friendship.”

Coming from a country with “really great universities,” however, offers Ella a contingency plan that she acknowledges as a privilege. If not Harvard, she’d attend the University of Toronto, ranked first in Canada and 16th globally by U.S. News & World Report. In Ella’s eyes, the acute concern for international students on campus has calmed down as many of Trump’s orders and proclamations have been met with injunctions from federal judges. That’s not to say it’s over, but she tries to take Harvard life one week at a time.

At the same time, however, Trump’s attacks on international students stick with her, adding pressure to prove herself worthy of a spot at Harvard.

“I’ll see what people are saying about international students, that we don’t necessarily deserve to be at a place like Harvard, that our spot should be taken by American students,” Ella says. Though she was always planning on pursuing public service, these claims have pushed her further towards that career.

“I want to sort of show them that I work really, really hard when I’m here and I’m doing my absolute best to succeed,” she adds. “I do feel I need to work really hard to prove why I do deserve to be here and that I do care about this county.”

Watching America Fade

By Aurora J.B. Sousanis

{shortcode-8c0dd475ea3269f67b1a4d37d27db5cc232a1fc2}hen she was six years old, V. decided she wanted to live in America.

Though she was born and lived in Mumbai at the time, her “gaze” was towards the States. All of the media, everything she consumed, was American. She and her best friend spent many afternoons watching Taylor Swift and Fifth Harmony videos on an iPad or listening to “Party in the USA” by Miley Cyrus on the school bus.

“That’s probably what we sung most,” says V., now a sophomore at the College. “And thought American life was like.”

When V. was 10, her family moved out of India and settled down in Jakarta, Indonesia. Over the course of her adolescence, V. grew to love both countries — visiting family in India and exploring Indonesia’s cuisine. At the same time, she felt she didn’t quite align with either world and struggled to know where to call home.

She hoped the United States held the solution.

Curling her feet up onto the seat of an armchair in an Adams House study room, the 18-year-old describes herself as a “third culture kid,” or someone who identifies more with a blend of cultures than any one in particular. To V., America was inherently a collage of ethnicities and origin stories. It was where “ands” became possible. One could have connections to a country abroad and New York. One could be from Jakarta and Mumbai. Study science and the humanities.

But with the Trump administration’s scrutiny of international students, V. has felt increasingly restricted, the “ands” starting to slip away. She has spent her sophomore year making a series of challenging decisions: whether or not to go home for the summer, what to study for the best chances of a post-grad visa extension, whether or not to speak to the press. Becoming increasingly aware of her identity, she’s begun to question her sense of belonging for the first time.

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In Jakarta, where V. attended an American international school, American students and Americanness surrounded her. “You can hear it in my voice,” she says. “I’m pretty Americanized.”

“When you’re in a place like that, it’s kind of easy to forget you’re not American,” says V.

In 2024, V.’s childhood dream came true with an acceptance letter to Harvard. She chose a U.S. university over a U.K. one, as she did not want to immediately commit to a particular course of study. An American liberal arts school, she hoped, would “welcome that sort of ambiguity or uncertainty.”

For the first semester, Harvard was everything she imagined it would be.

“I felt a lot of belonging here. It was a new stage of my life, I was making all these friends.

I felt like I understood the place and the place understood me,” says V. “I did not have to justify where I was from or who I was.”

(She does, however, recount a time she wore her favorite open-toed sandals — a staple of her fashion in India and Indonesia — on the first frigid day of the New England fall. “I was by the river, and I came from home, and I was a color that I had never seen before,” she says. “My roommate and I were holding my toes against the heater.”)

As a freshman, V. joined the Harvard College Project for Asian and International Relations, a club that leads student conferences in Cambridge and various cities across Asia, where she eagerly took on a leadership role. This year, the summer conference was held in Tokyo.

Though V. worried about her visa possibly complicating the Tokyo trip for her classmates, she says her biggest factor in her decision to leave the U.S. over the summer was her family and friends back home. Several of her international friends were canceling their flights, taking research opportunities in Cambridge instead.

Though V. knew then “it’s probably safer” to stay in the States, she missed home and her 12-year-old brother, who she feared was growing up without her.

V.’s parents, calling on WhatsApp, worry about their daughter on her journeys to and from the U.S. — but when asked if they suggested she didn’t come home this summer, they laugh. “V. has always been a very strong-headed, independent,” her mother says.

“Strong-willed is the word,” her father interjects.

Her mother agrees: “Okay, strong-willed.”

Back at Harvard this semester, V. describes the Trump administration’s attacks on international students as “background noise.” And yet, V. admits, “I wanted to come here because of all these ‘ands,’ all of these colors, and this power to be yourself no matter how complex of a person that is. And over the past year, I see less of that.”

As a sophomore, V. is preparing to declare her concentration. Under the STEM Optional Practical Training Program, international students majoring in pre-selected STEM fields are eligible to remain in the U.S. for three years after graduation compared to one year for non-STEM fields. Amid visa worries, V. is deciding to declare Neuroscience, rather than History of Science.

“It’s a small example,” says V. “I’m sure there’s so many people who could speak so much more to their freedoms being revoked. But all of a sudden that sort of wonderful multiplexing that I expected of America is fading.”

V.’s parents dropped her off at her freshman dorm 13 months ago, but have not returned to the U.S. since. “It’s not the same country it was two years ago,” her father says.

Her parents say that they never pushed their daughter to go to an Ivy League university; V. had always been dedicated, almost obsessively so, to her studies. In high school, she woke up at 3:30 every morning, made a cup of coffee, and studied for hours. She brought books to the dining room table, unable to put them down while reading.

These habits have continued into college. Hannah Sunil, a senior at Boston University, remembers a moment when V. got a text from an HPAIR leader while the two were out trying a South End seafood place. Upon receiving the text, V. immediately pulled out her laptop and started working, “right there in this fancy sit-down restaurant,” says Sunil, laughing at the memory of her “very busy” friend.

But throughout the last few months, V. says, she feels increasingly aware that she’s “not necessarily the same” as many of her classmates. One Trump comment continues to stick with her: “It’s a privilege, not a right to study here.”

“I know that it’s a privilege to be here, and I remind myself of that every day, but the latter half of that sentence ‘not a right…’” says V., trailing off for a moment to think.

“Like, do you think that I didn’t work hard? Do you think that I woke up one day and, boom, I was in Harvard? You don’t think that it took four years of dedication? I felt like all of me was kind of put to the side by that comment.”

The past few months have shaken her childhood dream to live in the U.S. post-grad. Part of that, she says, is that she’s grown up and come to find beauty in more of her home cities — both Jakarta and Mumbai. She misses the restaurants that don’t make her “pockets hurt” and the 90th-floor views of a nocturnal city.

But the other part is feeling “increasingly questioned and unwelcome as part of Trump’s attack on international students.”

From where V. sits in the study, student voices from the courtyard below begin to bleed in through the window as an Adams House event gets rolling. After recollecting her childhood daydreams of America, she pauses for a moment to put words to how that idealization has stood up in these times.

“I think I love America in pieces,” she concludes, fiddling slightly with her hands. “I think that it does not align with my six-year-old self vision of it, but I love the fact that we have third spaces here. I love this school. I love the place I’m sitting now,” she says, gesturing towards the sunlight streaming through the arched bay window on her right.

“I love the fact that I’m five minutes away from the river. I love the fact that I can strike up a conversation with a barista here, or a security guard, or literally become friends with somebody on the street just by complimenting their skirt. I don’t know,” she says.

“In these moments, I am so aware of how much I love this place.”

—Magazine writer Megha Khemka can be reached at megha.khemka@thecrimson.com.

—Magazine writer Christopher Schwarting can be reached at christopher.schwarting@thecrimson.com.

—Magazine writer Aurora J.B. Sousanis can be reached at aurora.sousanis@thecrimson.com.