Judge extends pause on Trump bid to block Harvard foreign students

[BOSTON] A judge on Monday extended a restraining order pausing Donald Trump’s ban on Harvard bringing in and hosting foreign students as part of the US president’s escalating campaign against the elite university.

Trump has tried a host of different tactics to block the Ivy League institution enrolling and educating international students.

They have included seeking to remove Harvard from an electronic student immigration registry, and instructing foreign embassies to deny visas to students hoping to attend the Massachusetts-based university.

Harvard had sued the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies to block the efforts, arguing that they were illegal and unconstitutional.

It previously secured a temporary restraining order against the government, which federal Judge Allison Burroughs extended Monday at a hearing in Boston.

International students accounted for 27 per cent of total enrollment at Harvard in the 2024-2025 academic year and are a major source of income.

“Court takes matter under advisement. Current temporary restraining order will stay in effect through June 23,” the court clerk wrote on the electronic case docket.

The halt on the Trump administration’s crackdown on Harvard’s foreign enrollees will be in force until Burroughs decides whether to further extend it with a preliminary injunction.

In court filings, Harvard has argued that Trump’s actions were “part of a concerted and escalating campaign of retaliation by the government in clear retribution for Harvard’s 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.”

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Alongside the campaign against Harvard’s foreign students, the Trump administration has also cut around US$3.2 billion of federal grants and contracts benefiting the university and pledged to exclude it from any future federal funding.

Harvard has been at the forefront of Trump’s campaign against top universities after it defied his calls to submit to oversight of its curriculum, staffing, student recruitment and “viewpoint diversity.”

Trump and his allies argue Harvard and other prestigious universities are unaccountable bastions of liberal, anti-conservative bias and anti-Semitism. AFP