Federal judge extends order blocking Trump administration ban on foreign students at Harvard
BOSTON: A federal judge on Thursday extended an order blocking the Trump administration's attempt to bar Harvard University from enrolling foreign students.
US District Judge Allison Burroughs extended the block she imposed last week with a temporary restraining order, which allows the Ivy League school to continue enrolling international students as a lawsuit proceeds.
Harvard sued the Department of Homeland Security on Friday after Secretary Kristi Noem revoked its ability to host foreign students at its campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
'Harvard will continue to take steps to protect the rights of our international students and scholars, members of our community who are vital to the University's academic mission and community — and whose presence here benefits our country immeasurably,' a university spokesman said in a statement.
On Wednesday, the Trump administration introduced a new effort to revoke Harvard's certification to enroll foreign students. In a letter sent by the acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement director, Todd Lyons, the government gave Harvard 30 days to respond to the alleged grounds for withdrawal, which include accusations that Harvard coordinated with foreign entities and failed to respond sufficiently to antisemitism on campus.
The developments unfolded in a courtroom not far from the Harvard campus, where speakers at Thursday's commencement ceremony stressed the importance of maintaining a diverse and international student body.
The dispute over international enrollment at Harvard is the latest escalation in a battle between the White House and the nation's oldest and wealthiest college. In April, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem sent a letter to the school, demanding a range of records related to foreign students, including discipline records and anything related to 'dangerous or violent activity.' Noem said it was in response to accusations of antisemitism on Harvard's campus.
Harvard says it complied. But on May 22, Noem sent a letter saying the school's response fell short. She said Harvard was being pulled from the federal program that allows colleges to sponsor international students to get US visas. It took effect immediately and prevented Harvard from hosting foreign students in the upcoming school year.
In its lawsuit, Harvard argued the government failed to follow administrative procedures and regulations for removing schools from eligibility to host international students, which include giving schools the opportunity to appeal and a 30-day window to respond.
Noem's earlier letter to Harvard notified the school that its eligibility was revoked immediately. It did not cite any regulations or statutes that Harvard allegedly violated. The Wednesday letter accuses Harvard of violating regulations around reporting requirements and violating an executive order regarding combatting antisemitism.
Already, despite the restraining order, the Trump administration's efforts to stop Harvard from enrolling international students have created an environment of 'profound fear, concern, and confusion,' the university's director of immigration services said in a court filing on Wednesday.
In a court filing, immigration services director Maureen Martin said that countless international students had asked about transferring.
Martin said that international Harvard students arriving in Boston were sent to additional screening by Customs and Border Protection agents, and that international students seeking to obtain their visas were being denied or facing delays at consulates and embassies.
More than 7,000 international students, exchange scholars and alumni participating in a post-graduate career training period rely on Harvard for their sponsorship and legal status in the United States.
The sanction, if allowed to proceed, could upend some graduate schools that draw heavily from abroad. Among those at risk was Belgium's Princess Elisabeth, who just finished her first year in a Harvard graduate program.
Trump railed against Harvard on social media after Burroughs temporarily halted the action last week, saying 'the best thing Harvard has going for it is that they have shopped around and found the absolute best Judge (for them!) — But have no fear, the Government will, in the end, WIN!'
The Trump administration has levied a range of grievances against Harvard, accusing it of being a hotbed of liberalism and failing to protect Jewish students from harassment. The government is demanding changes to Harvard's governance and policies to bring it in line with the president's vision.
Harvard was the first university to reject the government's demands, saying it threatened the autonomy that has long made US higher education a magnet for the world's top scholars. In a pair of lawsuits, Harvard accuses the government of retaliating against the university for rebuffing political demands.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Asharq Al-Awsat
2 hours ago
- Asharq Al-Awsat
Schwarzenegger Tells Environmentalists Dismayed by Trump to ‘Stop Whining' and Get to Work
Arnold Schwarzenegger has a message for environmentalists who despair at the approach of President Donald Trump's administration: 'Stop whining and get to work.' The new US administration has taken an ax to Biden-era environmental ambitions, rolled back landmark regulations, withdrawn climate project funding and instead bolstered support for oil and gas production in the name of an 'American energy dominance' agenda. Schwarzenegger, the former Republican governor of California, has devoted time to environmental causes since leaving political office in 2011. He said Tuesday he keeps hearing from environmentalists and policy experts lately who ask, 'What is the point of fighting for a clean environment when the government of the United States says climate change is a hoax and coal and oil is the future?' Schwarzenegger told the Austrian World Summit in Vienna, an event he helps organize, that he responds: 'Stop whining and get to work.' He pointed to examples of local and regional governments and companies taking action, including his own administration in California, and argued 70% of pollution is reduced at the local or state level. 'Be the mayor that makes buses electric; be the CEO who ends fossil fuel dependence; be the school that puts (up) solar roofs," he said. 'You can't just sit around and make excuses because one guy in a very nice White House on Pennsylvania Avenue doesn't agree with you,' he said, adding that attacking the president is 'not my style' and he doesn't criticize any president when outside the US. 'I know that the people are sick and tired of the whining and the complaining and the doom and gloom,' Schwarzenegger said. 'The only way we win the people's hearts and minds is by showing them action that makes their lives better.'
Asharq Al-Awsat
3 hours ago
- Asharq Al-Awsat
US to Eventually Reduce Military Bases in Syria to One, Says US Envoy
The United States has begun reducing its military presence in Syria with a view to eventually closing all but one of its bases there, the US envoy for the country has said in an interview. Six months after the ouster of longtime Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad, the United States is steadily drawing down its presence as part of Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR), a military task force launched in 2014 to fight the ISIS. "The reduction of our OIR engagement on a military basis is happening," the US envoy for Syria, Tom Barrack, said in an interview with Türkiye's NTV late on Monday. "We've gone from eight bases to five to three. We'll eventually go to one." But he admitted Syria still faced major security challenges under interim leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, whose coalition toppled Assad in December. Assad's ouster brought an end to Syria's bloody 14-year civil war, but the new authorities have struggled to contain recent bouts of sectarian violence. Barrack, who is also the US ambassador to Turkey, called for the "integration" of the country's ethnic and religious groups. "It's very tribal still. It's very difficult to bring it together," he said. But "I think that will happen," he added. The Pentagon announced in April that the United States would halve its troops in Syria to less than 1,000 in the coming months, saying the ISIS presence had been reduced to "remnants".
Asharq Al-Awsat
3 hours ago
- Asharq Al-Awsat
The One Way Trump Hasn't Changed the G.O.P.
By general consensus, if the policies of President Trump's first administration were a compromise between his impulses and the doctrines of the pre-Trump Republican Party, then Trump 2.0 is Trumpism in full. The old order is dissolved, the Bush and Reagan Republicans are exiled or subjugated, and Trump alone sets the agenda for the G.O.P. There are clearly areas where this is true. Trump's foreign policy can be described in various ways — as a form of Jacksonian-inflected realism, as a deal-making blitz, as an immoral attempt to promote a more authoritarian world order — but in each description you can see the outline of something coherent and clearly specific to Trump himself. Likewise the Trumpian culture war, which began with internal bureaucratic battles and now seeks to humble Harvard University, may be reckless or punitive or dubiously legal, but it's easy enough to tell a coherent story in which crushing the strongholds of cultural liberalism is a uniquely Trumpist goal. But the budget battles that delivered the passage of a House tax bill last week feel like a notable exception to this rule. Here the old Republican Party is still powerful, the old ideas still dominant. Here Trumpism as a transformative force is relatively weak, in part because Trump himself doesn't know exactly what he wants. And here it's hard to make the way the Republican majority intends to tax and spend cohere with other elements of the administration's agenda, on trade and immigration above all. In its broad strokes, the House tax bill could have been passed under any Republican president of my adult lifetime. Prioritizing low top tax rates and corporate tax cuts? That's the old song of supply-side economics. Combining those tax cuts with cuts to Medicaid and discretionary programs? That's Paul Ryan's Republican Party. Finding that your spending cuts don't pay for your tax cuts? That's the familiar deficit-financed conservatism of the Reagan and Bush presidencies. Of course, there are aspects of the tax bill that are specific to Trump and his coalition. The Ryan-era G.O.P. was open to trimming Medicare and Social Security; the Trump-era party won't go there. Now, one could counter that since Trump supports the 'big, beautiful' bill, it's Trumpist by definition. Maybe he just is an old-guard Republican on taxes and transfers. But I don't think that's quite right. Trump has lots of economic instincts that differ from the old consensus. That's why he pushed the party leftward on Medicare and Social Security. It's why he recently warned congressional Republicans not to mess with Medicaid. That default, in turn, does not cohere with the other elements of Trumpism. It doesn't cohere politically with his populist appeals because it offers relatively little to the president's downscale base. And it also doesn't cohere as economic policy because it doesn't match with the priorities implied by the president's big trade and immigration moves. Both of those big moves reject the logic of 1990s and early 2000s globalization, the assumption that the freest possible movement of goods and people would necessarily benefit the United States. On trade, for instance, the Trumpian idea that there is a particular interest in building up the American manufacturing base, whether for the sake of increasing blue-collar employment or the sake of national security, strongly implies that the government should be trying to act comprehensively to boost American industry and innovation in at least partial imitation of the Chinese model. The Trump administration has ideas in this area, and its deregulation strategy. My suspicion is that in the next year we'll get some talk about a Trump infrastructure or industrial policy bill but that, as in the first term, it will founder because House Republicans aren't interested and Democrats don't see any upside in bipartisanship. On immigration, similarly, the Trump theory is that America can prosper with much lower rates of low-skilled immigration, thanks to some combination of tech breakthroughs (maybe the robots are finally coming) and higher wages that coax male work force dropouts back to factory jobs. But in the longer run, if you have a much lower immigration rate, you need a higher domestic birthrate. Of course, it's possible that the Trump administration and America will be fortunate, that deregulation alone will clear a path for technological breakthroughs that happen independently of government support, that cultural ferment will yield a more rapid renewal of family formation than any program of baby bonuses or child tax credits. But in the realm of fiscal policy, amid debt and inflation risks, there will never be a Republican agenda oriented fully toward populist goals without a Republican president willing to break a conservative taboo that Trump has mostly left in place, by finding some way to be right-wing and also tax the rich. The New York Times
