Federal judge blocks the Trump administration from revoking Harvard’s ability to enroll foreign students

A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from revoking Harvard University’s ability to enroll or keep its international students.

U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs granted the temporary restraining order after the Department of Homeland Security on Thursday terminated the university’s international student certification. The move barred the school from not only admitting international students, but also ordering current foreign-born students to transfer or lose their legal status.

Under the order, international students can remain enrolled at the school. The next hearing for the case will take place next week.

The White House and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Harvard University sued the Trump administration on Friday, a day after the federal government said it would block the nation’s oldest university’s ability to enroll foreign students.

In a complaint filed in a U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, Harvard argued that the administration’s effort to block foreign students from enrollment violates the university’s First Amendment rights and would dramatically alter its ability to operate.

“With the stroke of a pen, the government has sought to erase a quarter of Harvard’s student body, international students who contribute significantly to the University and its mission,” the complaint states.

On Thursday, the administration terminated Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification, forcing the university’s foreign students, roughly a fourth of its student body, to either transfer or lose their legal status.

In the complaint — which names Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Attorney General Pam Bondi among the defendants — Harvard accuses the government of “clear retaliation for Harvard exercising its First Amendment right to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum and the ‘ideology’ of its faculty and students.”

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin called the lawsuit an attempt to “kneecap the President’s constitutionally vested powers.”

“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,” she said in a Friday statement. “The Trump administration is committed to restoring common sense to our student visa system; no lawsuit, this or any other, is going to change that.”

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement that “Harvard should spend their time and resources on creating a safe campus environment.”

“If only Harvard cared this much about ending the scourge of anti-American, anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist agitators on their campus, they wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with,” Abigail Jackson said.

The State Department and the Justice Department did not immediately return requests for comment.

The editorial board of the Crimson, the school’s student newspaper, released an op-ed ahead of the lawsuit’s announcement Friday, criticizing the Trump administration’s action against the school.

“In his ongoing feud with Harvard, Trump has decided that Harvard’s 6,000 international students are acceptable collateral damage,” the editorial board wrote. “They studied at America’s most storied institution. Through no fault of their own, they may leave with nothing.”

The university refused to comply with sweeping reforms from the administration’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism last month, which included who Harvard can admit or hire, and subjecting its faculty to a government audit.

“We condemn this unlawful and unwarranted action,” Alan M. Garber, Harvard’s president, said Friday in a letter to the university’s community. “It imperils the futures of thousands of students and scholars across Harvard and serves as a warning to countless others at colleges and universities throughout the country who have come to America to pursue their education and fulfill their dreams.”

The lawsuit was the second the university filed against the administration within recent weeks.

Harvard sued the administration last month to recoup over $2 billion in federal research funding that the administration stripped the university of after refusing the reforms.