Harvard students returns to school facing free speech test as international students worry about ICE

While students usually ask advice, like the best classes to take, international students this year are asking what to do if they're stopped by ICE.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — It was the first week of school at Harvard, and students were posted up at a usual spot in front of the library taking carefree selfies — steps away from a flyer calling for the “Fall of the Trump Fascist Regime.” Upperclassmen fell back into the familiarity of old friends — while freshmen from abroad, many stepping on campus for the first time as students, asked orientation advisers what to do if they encountered immigration agents.

Amid the crisp air distinct to the beginning of the school year, there was a sense of both routine and anxiety. The campus was seemingly normal but showed a few signs of its battle wounds from clashing with the Trump administration for months over federal funding and accusations of antisemitism. This year will be a further test case in free speech, students and staff members say. And there’s no telling how their Harvard experience will be shaped by an increasingly polarizing political environment.

The Trump administration “has done more to chill free speech on campuses than anybody in probably most of our lifetimes. We’re talking back to the McCarthy era,” Ryan Enos, a government professor at the Ivy League school, said. “I’m not going to censor what I’m going to say, but you worry that students are going to self-censor, and that would chill our classroom discussion.”