Harvard Sues Trump Administration Over ‘Clear Retaliation’ Move to Revoke Enrollment of Foreign Students

By Dave Levitan | May 23, 2025 | 9:15am

Photo by chensiyuan/Wikimedia Commons

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Harvard Sues Trump Administration Over ‘Clear Retaliation’ Move to Revoke Enrollment of Foreign Students

It took less than 24 hours for Harvard to strike back. On Thursday, with an utterly batshit announcement, the Trump administration moved to revoke the university’s ability to enroll foreign students, effectively trying to cut a quarter of of school’s student body in one fell swoop. On Friday morning, Harvard filed a lawsuit against the move, calling it an example of “clear retaliation for Harvard exercising its First Amendment rights to reject the government’s demands to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum, and the ‘ideology’ of its faculty and students.”

The Department of Homeland Security’s striking of Harvard’s F-1 visa status is only the latest in a string of moves obviously aimed at destroying the university, along with the rest of the Ivy League and probably the rest of the country’s higher education and research system too. According to the New York Times, there are at least eight separate investigations or actions from the administration specifically involving Harvard, spread out across six federal agencies, which is a totally normal number and doesn’t indicate any sort of weird obsession at all.

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“This revocation is a blatant violation of the First Amendment, the Due Process Clause, and the Administrative Procedure Act,” the Harvard lawsuit alleges. In a letter to the Harvard community posted online, the school’s president Alan Garber wrote that in contrast to what DHS claimed in its absurd rant, it did in fact provide information the department requested back in April.

“We condemn this unlawful and unwarranted action,” he wrote. “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.”

Along with the complaint, filed in the US District Court in Massachusetts, Garber said that a request for a temporary restraining order against the revocation will follow soon. [Update: The court already issued a TRO stopping this.] The lawsuit calls for the court to “vacate, set aside, and enjoin the government’s unlawful acts.” It also includes a statement that could double as a rebuke to the entire immigration policy of the Trump administration: “Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard.”