United Nations Investigator Asks Universities To Fight Against Trump at HLS Talk

United Nations Special Rapporteur Gina Romero urged Harvard to stand by free speech principles and protect international students against deportation threats from the Trump administration at a Harvard Law School talk on Tuesday.

“Use the power,” Romero said at the event, billed as a discussion about protest and freedom of assembly on university campuses. “This is a very powerful institution. We are not talking about a very small, poor university in a small isolated place.”

Romero, who was appointed in April by the U.N. to investigate global adherence to freedom of assembly and expression, said that in the face of federal funding cuts, universities should stand up to the Trump administration.

“Universities need to figure out on what side of this power struggle they are going to be,” she said. “Universities don’t exist without students. Without the students, universities are buildings.”

While Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 issued several statements in response to funding cuts from Washington, he has avoided attacking the Trump administration directly or launching any legal challenges against the president’s executive orders — many of which have since been blocked by judges.

A University spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

At the Tuesday event — which was organized by the HLS International Human Rights Clinic and moderated by Law School professor Susan H. Farbstein — Romero also criticized how American universities have responded to pro-Palestine protests, arguing that changes to protest policies and the use of police to end spring encampments at some universities represented bias against Black and Arab students.

She said the fear of deportation in particular could restrict access to free assembly by Harvard’s international student population.

Trump has repeatedly threatened to deport protesters who have broken laws, but escalated the attack last week by revoking the student visa and green card of former Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, who led pro-Palestine campus protests in spring 2024. His attempt to deport Khalil was also blocked by a federal judge on Monday.

“I cannot see students that are afraid of doing or going to a protest because they don’t want to be deported,” Romero said. “Universities need to protect their own students from those threats and then resist the pressure from external actors.

“Coming to the university shouldn't be a traumatic experience for exercising your rights,” she added.

At the Tuesday event, Romero also discussed her own transition to working at the U.N. from the Latin American and Caribbean Network for Democracy. She described receiving the special rapporteur position with the instruction to look into several potential human rights violations in the context of pro-Palestine protest.

She said that in many cases reported to the U.N., organizations had maintained “double standards” in their response to protest — specifically restricting pro-Palestine movements. She cited doxxing attacks, physical violence, and “administrative sanctions” at universities.

Romero said that frequent changes in university protest regulations — occuring “in some places, even daily” — resulted in confusion among students around what the rules actually were.

“Every time you restrict rights to young people, you are opening the door to actually silence a whole generation,” she said.