Harvard University has broadened its existing lawsuit against the administration of President Donald Trump to fight a new action that attempts to stop its international students from entering the United States.
On Thursday, the prestigious Ivy League school filed an amended complaint that alleges Trump’s latest executive order violates the rights of the school and its students.
Just one day earlier, Trump published an executive order claiming that “it is necessary to restrict the entry of foreign nationals who seek to enter the United States solely or principally” to attend Harvard.
He called Harvard’s international students a “class of aliens” whose arrival “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States”. As a result, he said that he had the right under the Immigration and Nationality Act to deny them entry into the country.
But in Thursday’s court filing, Harvard dismissed that argument as the latest salvo in Trump’s months-long campaign to harm the school.
“The President’s actions thus are not undertaken to protect the ‘interests of the United States,’ but instead to pursue a government vendetta against Harvard,” the amended complaint says.
It further alleged that, by issuing a new executive order to restrict students’ entry, the Trump administration was attempting to circumvent an existing court order that blocked it from preventing Harvard’s registration of foreign students.
The complaint called upon US District Judge Allison Burroughs in Massachusetts to extend her temporary restraining order to include Trump’s latest attack on Harvard’s foreign students.
“Harvard’s more than 7,000 F-1 and J-1 visa holders — and their dependents — have become pawns in the government’s escalating campaign of retaliation,” Harvard wrote.
Trump began his campaign against Harvard and other prominent schools earlier this year, after taking office for a second term as president. He blamed the universities for failing to take sterner action against the Palestinian solidarity protests that cropped up on their campuses in the wake of Israel’s war on Gaza.
The president called the demonstrations anti-Semitic and pledged to remove foreign students from the US who participated. Protest organisers, meanwhile, have argued that their aims were non-violent and that the actions of a few have been used to tar the movement overall.
Critics have also accused Trump of using the protests as leverage to exert greater control over the country’s universities, including private schools like Harvard and its fellow Ivy League school, Columbia University.
In early March, Columbia — whose protest encampments were emulated at campuses across the country — saw $400m in federal funding stripped from its budget.
The school later agreed to a list of demands issued by the Trump administration, including changes to its disciplinary policies and a review of its Middle East studies programme.
Harvard University was also given a list of demands to comply with. But unlike Columbia, it refused, citing concerns that the restrictions would limit its academic freedom.
The Trump administration’s demands included ending Harvard’s diversity programmes and allowing the federal government to audit its hiring and admissions processes to “establish viewpoint diversity”. When those demands were not met, it proceeded to strip Harvard of its federal funding, to the tune of billions of dollars.
Trump also threatened to revoke the school’s tax-exempt status and barred it from receiving future federal research grants.
But the attack on Harvard’s international students has threatened to drive away tuition revenue as well. Nearly a quarter of Harvard’s overall student body is from overseas.
In May, the Department of Homeland Security announced it would revoke Harvard’s access to a system, the Student Exchange Visitor Program, where it is required to log information about its foreign students.
That would have forced currently enrolled Harvard students to transfer to another school, if they were in the country on a student visa. It would have also prevented Harvard from accepting any further international students.
But Harvard sued the Trump administration, calling its actions “retaliatory” and “unlawful”.
On May 23, Judge Burroughs granted Harvard’s emergency petition for a restraining order to stop the restriction from taking effect. But since then, the Trump administration has continued to exert pressure on Harvard and other schools.
Earlier this week, for example, the Trump administration wrote a letter to Columbia University’s accreditor, accusing the New York City school of falling short of federal civil rights laws.
