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Tag Archives: Harvard University
BBC: Judge overturns Trump administration funding cuts to Harvard
A US federal court has overturned billions in funding cuts by President Donald Trump’s administration to Harvard University.
Judge Allison Burroughs ruled the government violated the Ivy League college’s free speech rights when it revoked around $2bn (£1.5bn) in research grants.
The ruling is a major legal victory for Harvard, but the White House has vowed to appeal. When it froze funding in April, the Trump administration accused the college of antisemitism, “radical left” ideologies and racial bias.
Three other Ivy League universities, Columbia, Penn and Brown, struck deals with Trump to preserve funding that was at risk due to similar claims by the administration, rather than go to court.
Boston-based Judge Burroughs wrote in Wednesday’s ruling: “The Court vacates and sets aside the Freeze Orders and Termination Letters as violative of the First Amendment.”
She blocked the administration from stopping any more federal funding to the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based college and barred the government from withholding payment on existing grants.
The White House said they would immediately challenge the “egregious decision” and called the judge an “activist” who was appointed by former President Barack Obama and was never going to rule in their favour.
“Harvard does not have a constitutional right to taxpayer dollars and remains ineligible for grants in the future,” assistant press secretary Liz Huston said.
Alan Garber, president of the university, said in a statement on their website that “the ruling affirms Harvard’s First Amendment and procedural rights”.
“We will continue to assess the implications of the opinion, monitor further legal developments, and be mindful of the changing landscape in which we seek to fulfill our mission,” he added.
Judge Burroughs wrote in her 84-page decision that Harvard should have done more to deal with antisemitism, which she said had “plagued” the institution in recent years.
“Harvard was wrong to tolerate hateful behavior for as long as it did,” wrote the judge.
But she said that fighting antisemitism was not the Trump administration’s “true aim” in penalising the nation’s oldest and richest university.
She suggested the government had “used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities”.
Judge Burroughs has previously blocked Trump’s efforts to prevent Harvard from hosting international students.
The university sued the Trump administration over the funding freeze in April, while also pledging to fight antisemitism.
Harvard’s president said no government “should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue”.
Trump has also threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status and take control of the university’s patents stemming from federally funded research.
The government has been discussing with Harvard a potential deal to unfreeze federal funding. Trump has said he wants the university to pay no less than $500m.
Washington Post: Scientist on green card detained for a week without explanation, lawyer says
Tae Heung Kim, a Korean citizen studying in the United States, is being held in San Francisco after returning from his brother’s wedding overseas.
A Korean-born researcher and longtime U.S. legal permanent resident has spent the past week detained by immigration officials at San Francisco International Airport without explanation and has been denied access to an attorney, according to his lawyer.
Tae Heung “Will” Kim, 40, has lived in the United States since he was 5 and is a green-card holder pursuing his PhD at Texas A&M University, where he is researching a vaccine for Lyme disease, said his attorney, Eric Lee. Immigration officials detained Kim at a secondary screening point July 21 after he returned from a two-week visit to South Korea for his younger brother’s wedding.
Lee said the government has not told him or Kim’s family why it detained Kim, and immigration officials have refused to let Kim speak to an attorney or communicate with his family members directly except for a brief call to his mother Friday. In 2011, Kim faced a minor marijuana possession charge in Texas, Lee said, but he fulfilled a community service requirement and successfully petitioned for nondisclosure to seal the offense from the public record.
“If a green card holder is convicted of a drug offense, violating their status, that person is issued a Notice to Appear and CBP coordinates detention space with [Immigration and Customs Enforcement],” a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said Tuesday in a statement to The Washington Post. “This alien is in ICE custody pending removal proceedings.”
Aside from a brief phone call, the only other contact Kim’s family has had with him is through what they believe to be secondhand text messages — probably an immigration official texting them from Kim’s phone in his presence. When relatives asked via text if Kim is sleeping on the floor or if the lights remain on all day, Lee said, the reply from Kim’s phone read: “Don’t worry about it.”
When Lee asked a CBP supervisor in a phone call if the Fifth and Sixth amendments — which establish rights to due process and the right to counsel — applied to Kim, the supervisor replied “no,” according to Lee.
“If the Constitution doesn’t apply to somebody who’s lived in this country for 35 years and is a green-card holder — and only left the country for a two-week vacation — that means [the government] is basically arguing that the Constitution doesn’t apply to anybody who’s been in this country for less time than him,” Lee said Monday.
Representatives for CBP and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment about the supervisor’s alleged comment about Kim’s constitutional rights.
President Donald Trump has made aggressive immigration enforcement a signature of his second term, promising to root out violent criminals who are in the country without authorization. But the crackdowns have in practice swept up undocumented immigrants with little or no criminal history, as well as documented immigrants, like Kim, who hold valid visas or green cards.
Lee, the attorney, said that with no details from immigration officials or direct access to Kim, he and Kim’s family could only speculate on the reason he was detained, though Lee had believed it is probably tied to the 2011 drug charge. But immigration law has a long-established waiver process that allows officials to overlook certain minor crimes that would otherwise threaten a legal permanent resident’s status. Lee said Kim easily meets the criteria for a waiver.
“Why detain him when he’s got this waiver that is available to him?” Lee said.
Other foreign-born researchers detained by the Trump administration have included scholars accused of being “national security threats” because they expressed views opposing U.S. foreign policy toward Israel. In another case, a Russian-born researcher studying at Harvard University was charged for allegedly smuggling frog embryos into the country.
At Texas A&M, Kim’s primary research has focused on finding a vaccine for Lyme disease, which is caused by bacteria spread through tick bites. He began his doctoral studies there in summer 2021 after earning a bachelor’s degree in ocean engineering from the university in 2007, Texas A&M said in a statement to The Post.
As Kim’s family waits for answers, his mother, Yehoon “Sharon” Lee, said she worries about his health and if he’s eating well — “mother’s concerns,” she said through an interpreter.
“I’m most concerned about his medical condition. He’s had asthma ever since he was younger,” Sharon Lee added. “I don’t know if he has enough medication. He carries an inhaler, but I don’t know if it’s enough, because he’s been there a week.”
Sharon Lee, 65, and her husband came to the U.S. on business visas in the 1980s, and she eventually became a naturalized citizen. But by then, Kim and his younger brother had aged out of the automatic citizenship benefit for minor children whose parents are naturalized. The brothers are legal permanent residents and have spent most of their lives in the United States.
“He’s a good son, very gentle,” Sharon Lee said of Tae Heung Kim, noting that he is a hard worker and known for checking on his neighbors. After his father died of cancer, Kim stepped up to help take care of his mother and the family’s doll-manufacturing business.
After more than three decades in the U.S., Sharon Lee said her son’s predicament has saddened and surprised her.
“I immigrated here to the States — I thought I understood it was a country of equal rights where the Constitution applies equally,” she said.
She still believes the U.S. is a country of opportunity and second chances. But she said vulnerable immigrants must learn about immigration law to protect themselves. In her son’s case, that was the hotline at the National Korean American Service and Education Consortium, an advocacy group for Koreans and Asian Americans.
Eric Lee, Kim’s attorney, said there’s a dark irony to the Trump administration’s detention of someone like him.
“This is somebody whose research is going to save countless lives if allowed to continue — farmers who are at risk of getting Lyme disease,” Lee said. “Trump always talks about how much he loves the great farmers of America. Well, Tae is somebody who can save farmers’ lives.”
Scientist on green card detained for a week without explanation, lawyer says
A Korean citizen studying in Texas on a green card was detained in San Francisco after a trip overseas.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/07/29/korean-scientist-green-card-detained
Reuters: Two-thirds of the DOJ unit defending Trump policies in court have quit
The U.S. Justice Department unit charged with defending against legal challenges to signature Trump administration policies – such as restricting birthright citizenship and slashing funding to Harvard University – has lost nearly two-thirds of its staff, according to a list seen by Reuters.
Sixty-nine of the roughly 110 lawyers in the Federal Programs Branch have voluntarily left the unit since President Donald Trump’s election in November or have announced plans to leave, according to the list compiled by former Justice Department lawyers and reviewed by Reuters.
The tally has not been previously reported. Using court records and LinkedIn accounts, Reuters was able to verify the departure of all but four names on the list.
Reuters spoke to four former lawyers in the unit and three other people familiar with the departures who said some staffers had grown demoralized and exhausted defending an onslaught of lawsuits against Trump’s administration.
“Many of these people came to work at Federal Programs to defend aspects of our constitutional system,” said one lawyer who left the unit during Trump’s second term. “How could they participate in the project of tearing it down?”
Critics have accused the Trump administration of flouting the law in its aggressive use of executive power, including by retaliating against perceived enemies and dismantling agencies created by Congress.
The Trump administration has broadly defended its actions as within the legal bounds of presidential power and has won several early victories at the Supreme Court. A White House spokesperson told Reuters that Trump’s actions were legal, and declined to comment on the departures.
“Any sanctimonious career bureaucrat expressing faux outrage over the President’s policies while sitting idly by during the rank weaponization by the previous administration has no grounds to stand on,” White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said in a statement.
The seven lawyers who spoke with Reuters cited a punishing workload and the need to defend policies that some felt were not legally justifiable among the key reasons for the wave of departures.
Three of them said some career lawyers feared they would be pressured to misrepresent facts or legal issues in court, a violation of ethics rules that could lead to professional sanctions.
All spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal dynamics and avoid retaliation.
A Justice Department spokesperson said lawyers in the unit are fighting an “unprecedented number of lawsuits” against Trump’s agenda.
“The Department has defeated many of these lawsuits all the way up to the Supreme Court and will continue to defend the President’s agenda to keep Americans safe,” the spokesperson said. The Justice Department did not comment on the departures of career lawyers or morale in the section.
Some turnover in the Federal Programs Branch is common between presidential administrations, but the seven sources described the number of people quitting as highly unusual.
Reuters was unable to find comparative figures for previous administrations. However, two former attorneys in the unit and two others familiar with its work said the scale of departures is far greater than during Trump’s first term and Joe Biden’s administration.
Heading for the Exit
The exits include at least 10 of the section’s 23 supervisors, experienced litigators who in many cases served across presidential administrations, according to two of the lawyers.
A spokesperson said the Justice Department is hiring to keep pace with staffing levels during the Biden Administration. They did not provide further details.
In its broad overhaul of the Justice Department, the Trump administration has fired or sidelined dozens of lawyers who specialize in prosecuting national security and corruption cases and publicly encouraged departures from the Civil Rights Division.
But the Federal Programs Branch, which defends challenges to White House and federal agency policies in federal trial courts, remains critical to its agenda.
The unit is fighting to sustain actions of the cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency formerly overseen by Elon Musk; Trump’s order restricting birthright citizenship and his attempt to freeze $2.5 billion in funding to Harvard University.
“We’ve never had an administration pushing the legal envelope so quickly, so aggressively and across such a broad range of government policies and programs,” said Peter Keisler, who led the Justice Department’s Civil Division under Republican President George W. Bush.
“The demands are intensifying at the same time that the ranks of lawyers there to defend these cases are dramatically thinning.”
The departures have left the Justice Department scrambling to fill vacancies. More than a dozen lawyers have been temporarily reassigned to the section from other parts of the DOJ and it has been exempted from the federal government hiring freeze, according to two former lawyers in the unit.
A Justice Department spokesperson did not comment on the personnel moves.
Justice Department leadership has also brought in about 15 political appointees to help defend civil cases, an unusually high number.
The new attorneys, many of whom have a record defending conservative causes, have been more comfortable pressing legal boundaries, according to two former lawyers in the unit.
“They have to be willing to advocate on behalf of their clients and not fear the political fallout,” said Mike Davis, the head of the Article III Project, a pro-Trump legal advocacy group, referring to the role of DOJ lawyers in defending the administration’s policies.
People who have worked in the section expect the Federal Programs Branch to play an important role in the Trump administration’s attempts to capitalize on a Supreme Court ruling limiting the ability of judges to block its policies nationwide.
Its lawyers are expected to seek to narrow prior court rulings and also defend against an anticipated rise in class action lawsuits challenging government policies.
Lawyers in the unit are opposing two attempts by advocacy organizations to establish a nationwide class of people to challenge Trump’s order on birthright citizenship. A judge granted one request on Thursday.
Facing Pressure
Four former Justice Department lawyers told Reuters some attorneys in the Federal Programs Branch left over policy differences with Trump, but many had served in the first Trump administration and viewed their role as defending the government regardless of the party in power.
The four lawyers who left said they feared Trump administration policies to dismantle certain federal agencies and claw back funding appeared to violate the U.S. Constitution or were enacted without following processes that were more defensible in court.
Government lawyers often walked into court with little information from the White House and federal agencies about the actions they were defending, the four lawyers said.
The White House and DOJ did not comment when asked about communications on cases.
Attorney General Pam Bondi in February threatened disciplinary action against government lawyers who did not vigorously advocate for Trump’s agenda. The memo to Justice Department employees warned career lawyers they could not “substitute personal political views or judgments for those that prevailed in the election.”
Four of the lawyers Reuters spoke with said there was a widespread concern that attorneys would be forced to make arguments that could violate attorney ethics rules, or refuse assignments and risk being fired.
Those fears grew when Justice Department leadership fired a former supervisor in the Office of Immigration Litigation, a separate Civil Division unit, accusing him of failing to forcefully defend the administration’s position in the case of Kilmar Abrego, the man wrongly deported to El Salvador.
The supervisor, Erez Reuveni, filed a whistleblower complaint, made public last month, alleging he faced pressure from administration officials to make unsupported legal arguments and adopt strained interpretations of rulings in three immigration cases.
Justice Department officials have publicly disputed the claims, casting him as disgruntled. A senior official, Emil Bove, told a Senate panel that he never advised defying courts.
Career lawyers were also uncomfortable defending Trump’s executive orders targeting law firms, according to two former Justice Department lawyers and a third person familiar with the matter.
A longtime ally of Bondi who defended all four law firm cases argued they were a lawful exercise of presidential power. Judges ultimately struck down all four orders as violating the Constitution. The Trump administration has indicated it will appeal at least one case.
Not everybody wants to continue hanging out with a bunch of losers!
Raw Story: ‘We are alarmed’: University staff condemn Trump DOJ as president forced out
More than 100 professors and staff from the University of Virginia signed an open letter on Friday opposing the efforts of the Department of Justice to force out university president Jim Ryan.
Ryan was the subject of a pressure campaign mounted by the Justice Department’s two top civil rights lawyers, Harmeet Dillon and Gregory Brown. The two layers reportedly asked Ryan to resign to resolve a federal inquiry into whether the university had shut down its diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, programs.
The New York Times reported that Ryan submitted his letter of resignation on Thursday and expressed “deep sadness” about his decision.
“We are alarmed by the attempted use of government power to impose an ideological agenda on an institution with a proud, 206-year tradition of liberty in thought and expression,” the letter reads in part.
“The forced installation of a new president under these circumstances would impede the exchange of ideas, set a dangerous precedent for the destruction of academic freedom, and cast a shadow on the integrity of the research and teaching conducted at the university,” it continues.
NBC News: Judge again blocks Trump administration from halting Harvard’s enrolling international students
A federal judge directed the Trump administration to restore “every visa holder and applicant to the position that individual would have been” before the ban was enacted.
A federal judge in Massachusetts on Friday further blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to revoke Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students while giving those students additional legal protections.
U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs issued the preliminary injunction after having granted a temporary restraining order against the federal government this month.
The injunction holds that the administration is blocked from yanking Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification, which was based on a May 22 revocation notice the Department of Homeland Security sent to Harvard administrators.
In her decision, Burroughs directed the government to “immediately” prepare guidance to alert Trump administration officials to disregard that notice and to restore “every visa holder and applicant to the position that individual would have been absent such Revocation Notice.”
It also says the student visa holders should not be denied entry to the country as a result of the revocation.
The government must “file a status report within 72 hours of entry of this Order describing the steps taken to ensure compliance with this Order and certifying compliance with its requirements,” Burroughs wrote.
Slate: Trump Promises to Keep Terrorizing Blue Cities. It Might Come Back to Haunt Him.
Donald Trump won the presidency in part on promises to deport immigrants who have criminal records and lack permanent legal status. But his earliest executive orders—trying to undo birthright citizenship, suspending critical refugee programs—made clear he wants to attack immigrants with permanent legal status too. In our series Who Gets to Be American This Week?, we’ll track the Trump administration’s attempts to exclude an ever-growing number of people from the American experiment.
President Donald Trump’s immigration raids have disrupted life in Los Angeles in a way the mayor is comparing to COVID; they’ve created a climate of fear that’s driving people into hiding and hurting local businesses. This week, the president promised to expand those raids in blue cities, all in a futile attempt to hit 1 million deportations by the end of the year. After suggesting last week that ICE would stop targeting the agriculture and hotel industries, which disproportionately rely on immigrant labor, the administration also walked back that guidance.
And a troubling trend is emerging: As Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts get more aggressive and reckless, several elected officials who attempted to conduct oversight or question what is being done have been arrested.
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“Overwhelmingly, Americans do not want ICE raids that focus on those without criminal records. That’s why polls show that Trump is losing voter approval on these key issues,” Mukherjee said.
Trump Promises to Keep Terrorizing Blue Cities. It Might Come Back to Haunt Him.
And Democrats keep getting arrested while trying to hold ICE accountable.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/06/donald-trump-brad-lander-ice-raid-los-angeles.html
2 paragraphs: JD Vance Slammed for University “Crisis” Comment, “Your Intellectual Justifications…Are Insulting”
After a federal judge on Friday blocked the Trump administration’s attempts to stop Harvard University from enrolling foreign students, the Vice President of the United States JD Vance continued to attack the state of American higher education in broad strokes.
Taking aim at issues beyond the scope of the administration’s current accusations against Harvard, Vance wrote on Saturday on X: “There is an extraordinary ‘reproducibility crisis’ in the sciences, particularly in biology, where most published papers fail to replicate.”
…
Vance continued with a litany of wide-ranging complaints: “Most universities have massive bureaucracies that inhibit the translation of basic research into commercial adoption.”
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Vance also slammed colleges for the way professors allegedly vote, saying that “the voting patterns of university professors are so one-sided that they look like the election results of North Korea.”
“And on top of all of this,” Vance claimed, “many universities explicitly engage in racial discrimination (mostly against whites and asians) that violates the civil rights laws of this country.
“Our universities could see the policies of the Trump administration as a necessary corrective to these problems, change their policies, and work with the administration to reform.
“Or, they could yell ‘fascism’ at basic democratic accountability and drift further into irrelevance.”
Executive summary: Greenland didn’t want me, the Pope bitch-slapped me for my childish, self-centered interpretation of ordo amoris, and now I’m doing my fascist best to become persona non grata at our nation’s flagship universities.
JD Vance Slammed for University “Crisis” Comment, “Your Intellectual Justifications…Are Insulting”
After a federal judge on Friday blocked the Trump administration’s attempts to stop Harvard University from enrolling foreign students, the Vice President of the United States JD Vance continued to a
News Nation: Judge: Harvard researcher charged with smuggling frog embryos was unlawfully detained by ICE
A federal judge in Vermont on Wednesday released a Russian-born scientist and Harvard University researcher from immigration custody as she deals with a criminal charge of smuggling frog embryos into the United States.
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Petrova, 30, is currently in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service in Louisiana. She is expected to be brought to Massachusetts as early as Friday in preparation for a bail hearing next week on the smuggling charge, lawyers said in court.
Another loss for King Donald & his bully boys!
https://www.newsnationnow.com/us-news/ap-us-news/ap-judge-harvard-researcher-charged-with-smuggling-frog-embryos-was-unlawfully-detained-by-ice
Associated Press: Trump’s big plans on trade and more run up against laws of political gravity, separation of powers
On Wednesday, an obscure but powerful court in New York rejected the legal foundation of Trump’s most sweeping tariffs, finding that Trump could not use a 1977 law to declare a national emergency on trade imbalances and fentanyl smuggling to justify a series of import taxes that have unsettled the world. Reordering the global economy by executive fiat was an unconstitutional end-run around Congress’ powers, the three-judge panel of Trump, Obama and Reagan appointees ruled in a scathing rebuke of Trump’s action.
The setbacks fit a broader pattern for a president who has advanced an extraordinarily expansive view of executive power. Federal courts have called out the lack of due process in some of Trump’s deportation efforts. His proposed income tax cuts, now working their way through Congress, are so costly that some of them can’t be made permanent, as Trump had wished. His efforts to humble Harvard University and cut the federal workforce have encountered legal obstacles. And he’s running up against reality as his pledges to quickly end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have turned into slogs.
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By unilaterally ordering tariffs, deportations and other actions through the White House, Trump is bypassing both Congress and the broader public, which could have given more popular legitimacy to his policy choices, said Princeton University history professor Julian Zelizer.
“The president is trying to achieve his goals outside normal legal processes and without focusing on public buy-in,” Zelizer said. “The problem is that we do have a constitutional system and there are many things a president can’t do. The courts are simply saying no. The reality is that many of his boldest decisions stand on an incredibly fragile foundation.”
Trump’s big plans on trade and more run up against laws of political gravity, separation of powers
President Donald Trump’s big plans on trade, deportations and more are running up against the laws of political gravity and the separation of powers.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-judges-courts-setbacks-1864c944c8142f18fd3075d5643bdefc