Harvard Secures Victory as Trump's Foreign Student Ban Is Overturned

() -- Harvard University won a temporary reprieve from President Donald Trump’s ban on its international students entering the US, a legal setback for the administration in its high-profile fight with the school.

US District Judge Allison Burroughs ruled Thursday that the government can’t enforce Trump’s proclamation that escalates his feud with the university over foreign students. The judge ruled after Harvard amended a May 23 lawsuit over another US order to stop Harvard from enrolling international students. Burroughs had already blocked that effort.

The Boston-based judge granted a temporary restraining order, saying Harvard would face “immediate and irreparable injury” if the proclamation went into effect. She set a hearing for June 16.

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In issuing the proclamation Wednesday, Trump said that Harvard’s refusal to provide records about international student misconduct poses a national security risk. His executive action blocked Harvard’s foreign students and researchers from entering the country. Last month, the administration revoked the school’s ability to sponsor their visas.

Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said Thursday’s ruling “delays justice and seeks to kneecap the President’s constitutionally vested powers.”

‘Privilege, Not a Right’

“It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition payments to help pad their multibillion-dollar endowments; that fact hasn’t changed,” she said in a statement. “The Trump administration is committed to restoring common sense to our student visa system, and we expect a higher court to vindicate us in this.”

Harvard President Alan Garber had urged the judge to act swiftly.

“While the court considers our request, contingency plans are being developed to ensure that international students and scholars can continue to pursue their work at Harvard this summer and through the coming academic year,” Garber said in a statement just after the university amended its lawsuit.

“Singling out our institution for its enrollment of international students and its collaboration with other educational institutions around the world is yet another illegal step taken by the administration to retaliate against Harvard,” he said.

Trump’s proclamation intensifies his standoff with the oldest and richest US university, where foreign students make up 27% of the campus population. Harvard has also sued over the US freezing more than $2.6 billion in federal funding.

Both lawsuits claim Trump is illegally retaliating against Harvard, violating the school’s free speech rights because it failed to adhere to his wishes.

‘Campaign of Retaliation’

Trump’s actions are “part of a concerted and escalating campaign of retaliation by the government in clear retribution for Harvard’s exercising its First Amendment rights to reject the government’s demands to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum, and the ‘ideology’ of its faculty and students,” lawyers for the university said in the amended lawsuit.

Trump’s order claims Harvard is “no longer a trustworthy steward of international student and exchange visitor programs,” accusing the school of failing to address conduct violations and an increase of “violent crime rates” on campus. It also criticizes Harvard’s researchers for partnering with Chinese colleagues in ways it says could advance Beijing’s military modernization effort.

The proclamation places a six-month suspension on international students and exchange visitors seeking to do research. It also directs Secretary of State Marco Rubio to review whether the visas of existing foreign nationals at Harvard should be revoked. The US would make an exception for “any alien whose entry would be in the national interest,” according to the proclamation.

The university has said that it has been in regular contact with DHS and supplied the legally required data and additional disciplinary information on international students.

Burroughs had already temporarily barred the government from revoking Harvard’s participation in its Student and Exchange Visitor Program, which is run by DHS. In Thursday’s order, she extended that pause until June 20.

Harvard’s more than 7,000 students and researchers who hold visas “have become pawns in the government’s escalating campaign of retaliation,” lawyers for the university said in the lawsuit. “The proclamation is a patent effort to end-run this court’s order.”

The new ruling by Burroughs increases the chances that the case could end up at the Supreme Court. In 2018, the high court ruled that the president has sweeping authority to restrict entry into the country. That 5-4 ruling upheld Trump’s travel ban, which barred entry by people from a group of mostly Muslim countries.

‘I Feel Unwelcome’

Harvard’s undergraduate student body president, Abdullah Shahid Sial, went home to Pakistan after the school year ended. Now, whether he comes back to campus for his junior year is “totally in the hands of U.S. immigration offices.”

“I think the Trump administration has done a very good job of making international students feel unwelcome,” said Sial, 20. “I feel unwelcome.”

The president has sought to reshape Harvard’s policies on a wide range of issues, including admissions and faculty hiring practices, citing the pro-Palestinian protests and incidents of antisemitism that rocked college campuses after Hamas’ October 2023 attack on Israel started the war in Gaza.

Trump has said he wants to cap Harvard’s foreign student enrollment at 15%, revoke its tax-exempt status and cancel its remaining federal contracts.

In another action Wednesday against universities, the Trump administration announced that it was asking an agency to revoke the accreditation of Columbia University.

The case is Harvard v. US Department of Homeland Security, 25-cv-11472, US District Court, District of Massachusetts (Boston).

--With assistance from Kate Sullivan.

(Updates with additional quote from Garber in second section.)

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