The Ivy League university has expanded an existing lawsuit to include Trump’s latest actions to restrict its international student body.
A judge in Massachusetts has blocked United States President Donald Trump’s latest executive order banning Harvard University’s international students from entering the country.
The temporary restraining order issued late on Thursday by US District Judge Allison Burroughs came just hours after the prestigious Ivy League school asked the court to extend an earlier order to include Trump’s latest move against foreign students.
Burroughs’s order states that Harvard would “sustain immediate and irreparable injury” due to Trump’s directive prohibiting foreign nationals from entering the US to study at the university, before the courts have a chance to review the case.
It temporarily restricts the government from “implementing, instituting, maintaining, enforcing, or giving force or effect” to Trump’s proclamation, according to US media reports.
Harvard had previously obtained an emergency restraining order in May from the same judge to stop the Department of Homeland Security from implementing Trump’s earlier decision to revoke the university’s access to a system registering international students holding US visas.
On Wednesday, Trump published an executive order claiming that his new order was “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 just the latest attempt by Trump 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 school’s amended complaint says.
The complaint called on the court to extend the earlier temporary restraining order to include Trump’s latest attack.
“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’s campaign against Harvard
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 who participated from the US.
Protest organisers, meanwhile, have argued that their aims were nonviolent 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.
Trump also threatened to revoke the school’s tax-exempt status and barred it from receiving future federal research grants.
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.
Source:
Al Jazeera and news agencies