Graduate student unions and bargaining teams are escalating demands tied to immigration crackdowns, seeking contractual protections for international students amid shifting federal enforcement priorities. At Harvard, graduate workers’ strike included a key contract demand for stronger protections for noncitizen students at risk of deportation. Meanwhile, the MIT Graduate Student Union is pushing for additional remote-work flexibility for visa-constrained students and for MIT to pledge not to comply with immigration agents without a judicial warrant. Similar provisions have surfaced in recent contract agreements for graduate workers at Cornell, Penn, and public universities in California and Maine. Union representatives say the effort is being driven by specific federal actions. Those include DHS moving to strip Harvard of authority to enroll international students, and viral arrests of graduate students at Columbia and Tufts tied to pro-Palestinian activism. The unions are also seeking limits on how institutions share student information with federal authorities. The immediate operational question for universities is whether they will treat immigration-related protections as a core bargaining issue—requiring new internal procedures for handling student records, remote work, and external information requests during labor negotiations.