A judge in Massachusetts has blocked United States President Donald Trump’s executive order banning Harvard University’s international students from entering the country.
Late on Thursday, US District Judge Allison Burroughs extended an existing injunction to cover the new executive order, granting a petition made earlier in the day by Harvard.
It was the latest legal manoeuvre in an ongoing feud between Trump and the prestigious Ivy League school, located in Massachusetts.
Earlier in the week, Trump had issued an executive order designating international students at Harvard 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.
Trump had previously attempted to prevent Harvard from enrolling foreign students, who comprise approximately a quarter of its student body. Harvard had sought — and been granted — a temporary restraining order to prevent that earlier action from taking effect.
In Thursday’s petition, Harvard argued that Trump’s latest effort should also be barred under that existing restraining order. It characterised the idea of blocking students’ entry into the US as yet another attempt by Trump to harm Harvard.
“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 updated complaint read.
“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.”
Burroughs sided with Harvard, saying that Trump’s executive order would cause Harvard and its students to “sustain immediate and irreparable injury”. The court’s injunction prevents the government from “implementing, instituting, maintaining, enforcing, or giving force or effect” to the order while Harvard’s legal challenge proceeds.
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.
