Posted on 06/06/25
| News Source: Politico
A federal judge has blocked President Donald Trump’s bid to prevent international students from entering the U.S. or getting visas to attend Harvard University.
U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs issued a temporary restraining order Thursday night instructing the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department to disregard a proclamation Trump issued Wednesday wielding presidential immigration authority to effectively ban foreign nationals from entering the U.S. to study or teach at Harvard.
In a two-page order, Burroughs said Harvard showed it “will sustain immediate and irreparable injury before there is an opportunity to hear from all parties” about the legality of Trump’s directive. The judge’s order came less than four hours after the Ivy League school added claims about Trump’s proclamation to a pending lawsuit over an earlier Trump administration move to revoke a certification Harvard has held for more than 70 years to enroll foreign students.
Burroughs, an Obama appointee, issued a similar restraining order against the earlier move by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. At a hearing in Boston last week, the judge also stated her intention to issue a preliminary injunction that would preserve what she called “the status quo” as the litigation continues. She’d instructed both sides to work on the wording of that order before Trump escalated the battle Wednesday with his proclamation.
That directive did not immediately revoke existing student visas for Harvard affiliates, but the president ordered Secretary of State Marco Rubio to consider taking that step. But the order threatened to make it impossible for Harvard to get foreign students and faculty to the U.S. for the upcoming fall semester and to strand abroad some current Harvard students who left the U.S. in recent weeks.
Harvard’s lawyers argue in their amended suit that the president’s actions “are not undertaken to protect the ‘interests of the United States,’ but instead to pursue a government vendetta against Harvard.” Pointing to recent comments by Trump in the Oval Office and on social media, the school contends that his latest actions are unconstitutional retaliation for its decision to go to court rather than acquiesce to his demands.
The amended suit and new TRO request are the latest moves in the ever-intensifying battle between Harvard and Trump. It has primarily focused on the university’s response to campus antisemitism. Trump’s administration has said the school failed to protect Jewish students from harassment. But Harvard says demands outlined by the administration don’t address antisemitism and instead aim to control the institution’s governance, curriculum, and the ideology of its faculty and students. Trump has also broadened his critique of the school, complaining that it takes too much money from foreign governments, enrolls too many foreign students and is hostile to conservatives.