Harvard, Union Hash Out Immigration Policies Amid National ICE Raid Wave

Harvard agreed to provide non-tenure-track employees with paid leave during immigration proceedings, but declined to commit to sponsoring legal permanent residency applications in a contract counter proposal presented on Monday.

University representatives have been negotiating with Harvard Academic Workers-United Auto Workers for more than six months over their first union contract. At a Monday session, Harvard presented its first counter proposal on protections for non-citizen workers, keeping a provision to not provide Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers with faculty members’ confidential information.

Existing contracts with several major campus unions do not include language about information requests by ICE, but the graduate student union contract does include a general policy of keeping immigration information confidential.

In a session last month, the HAW-UAW bargaining unit presented the initial article with provisions for international students, asking the University to extend employment offers during the visa approval process before their official start date, in addition to sponsoring green card applicants.

In their counter proposal, the University crossed out much of the union’s proposal — nixing the green-card provision entirely — but retained language on withholding information from ICE unless required by law.

A University spokesperson declined to comment for this article.

The union, which represents roughly 3,600 post-doctoral fellows and non-tenure-track faculty, has been negotiating with the University since September after voting to unionize in April.

Amid outrage over the Trump administration’s decision to detain several international students at U.S. universities, the HAW-UAW contract negotiations provide a public window into Harvard’s policies for interactions with law enforcement.

Harvard officials have previously declined to elaborate on its policy of directing federal officials to the Harvard University Police Department or the Office of the General Counsel when they request access to non-public campus spaces.

On Tuesday, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University, was detained by ICE after publishing an editorial in the student newspaper encouraging Tufts administrators to divest from companies connected to Israel.

The union has also called on the University to provide clarity on its hiring freeze policy announced by Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 last month. At the Monday session, University officials fielded questions from faculty on research grant cuts and if there were hiring freeze exceptions.

Bargaining committee member J. Gregory Given said the University had “very few answers” to union members’ questions, but added that “the fact that the bargaining team had few answers does not mean that administrators at Harvard don’t have answers to these questions.”

“It just means that the bargaining team at that time had not been prepped on those answers, necessarily,” he said.

According to bargaining committee member Sara M. Feldman, a Yiddish preceptor in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, the hiring freeze is especially concerning because it occurred as administrators were filling positions for time-capped workers leaving this year.

“We expect that other fields are also going to face cuts, and that in some departments, there are just going to be fewer faculty to teach the same number of students,” she said.

The union also presented a new “Protecting Disciplinary Vitality” proposal earlier this month

to prevent the University from restructuring or eliminating academic programs without union consent.

The proposal includes language requiring the University to bargain before downsizing departments — a protection for smaller fields “that might find themselves on the chopping block in periods of political pressure or financial austerity,” organizers wrote in an email update to members after the March 6 session.

“Harvard University is a very unusual institution and has an important role to play in the preservation and production of knowledge, even in small fields,” Feldman said.

“So in the case of vulnerable and endangered languages, for example, if you cut that at Harvard, where is it going to be safe?” she added.

While the union has yet to conclude negotiations on some of its most contentious issues — including time caps — it reached a tentative agreement with the University on employee assistance programs, and, according to the union, is nearing an agreement on grievance and arbitration.

Correction: March 29, 2025

A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Harvard kept a provision to not provide Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers with students’ confidential information in a counterproposal. In fact, the provision dealt with faculty members’ information.

—Staff writer Hugo C. Chiasson can be reached at hugo.chiasson@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @HugoChiassonn.

—Staff writer Amann S. Mahajan can be reached at amann.mahajan@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @amannmahajan.