Harvard Asks Judge To Block Trump Proclamation Banning Entry of New International Students

Updated June 5, 2025, at 7:33 p.m.

Harvard filed an amended complaint in federal court Thursday evening, accusing the Trump administration of unlawfully retaliating against the school by barring international students from entering the United States on visas to attend Harvard.

The filing comes less than 24 hours after President Donald Trump issued a proclamation suspending entry for foreign nationals intending to study at Harvard — a move the University alleged was designed to sidestep a judge’s temporary block on the government’s earlier attempt to strip Harvard of its Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification.

“When the Court enjoined the Secretary’s efforts to revoke Harvard’s certifications and force its students to transfer or depart the country, the President sought to achieve the same result by refusing to allow Harvard students to enter in the first place,” Harvard’s lawyers wrote. “That was an unlawful evasion of the Court’s order.”

The University’s amended complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, described the harm caused by the proclamation as immediate and irreparable. It asked the judge overseeing the case, Allison D. Burroughs, to enjoin the federal government from enforcing Trump’s proclamation.

Harvard has also requested a preliminary injunction to keep its SEVP status in place until the lawsuit is resolved. Burroughs has not yet ruled on the preliminary injunction but decided last week to extend the temporary restraining order preventing the Department of Homeland Security from stripping Harvard’s SEVP status.

Harvard’s amended complaint was accompanied by a request for a TRO to immediately block the Wednesday proclamation. The filing also asked for an extension until June 20 on the existing TRO, saying that the proclamation had thrown a wrench in Harvard’s negotiations with federal agencies to agree on the terms of a preliminary injunction.

Thursday’s filing adds the proclamation to the list of actions Harvard has described — across two lawsuits — as a coordinated federal campaign to punish the institution for refusing to comply with sweeping federal demands over its governance, admissions, and academic programming.

Harvard alleged that the actions violate the First Amendment, the Administrative Procedure Act, and long-standing immigration law. Harvard is seeking immediate injunctive relief to restore its ability to host international students under the F-1 and J-1 visa programs and to block enforcement of the proclamation.

Trump justified his Wednesday order as a national security measure, asserting without evidence that Harvard’s international students were driving rising rates of crime on campus.

But Harvard’s lawyers shot back in the 101-page filing, writing that the order was simply the latest in a campaign against 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,” they wrote.

Trump’s order came just days after a federal court reinstated Harvard’s SEVP certification, which the Department of Homeland Security had attempted to revoke on May 22. The revocation threatened the legal status of more than 7,000 international students and scholars at Harvard and prompted an emergency legal challenge by the University.

Rather than comply with the court’s ruling, Harvard argued, the administration escalated its campaign.

In the filing, Harvard’s lawyers claimed that the legal statutes cited in Wednesday’s executive order are “plainly inapplicable” because the order does not suspend entry for a group of nonimmigrants, but rather for individuals associated with a particular institution.

“The President is not suspending entry for any ‘class of aliens’; to the contrary, nonimmigrants may enter the country unabated, as long as they do not attend Harvard,” they wrote.

The University’s lawyers argued that rather than attempting to protect national interests through the ban, Trump was using it to punish Harvard — which, they said, overstepped his authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Harvard’s lawyers painted the proclamation as part of a broader pattern of politically motivated retaliation, pointing to a string of public statements by senior administration officials, including Trump himself, who sought to punish Harvard for resisting federal oversight.

In particular, the University cited remarks made by Trump during an April 30 cabinet meeting in which he said, of Harvard, that “the students they have, the professors they have, the attitude they have is not American.”

Shortly after the complaint was filed, University President Alan M. Garber ’76 assured affiliates in an email that “contingency plans” were being developed to allow students to continue their work during the summer and the upcoming academic year. Garber wrote that the Harvard International Office would be in touch with students directly affected by the proclamation or by Trump’s travel bans on 12 countries, also announced Wednesday.

Garber reaffirmed the importance of international students to Harvard’s campus and his commitment to defending their place in the University.

“International students and scholars make outstanding contributions inside and outside of our classrooms and laboratories, fulfilling our mission of excellence in countless ways,” he wrote. “We will celebrate them, support them, and defend their interests as we continue to assert our Constitutional rights.”

—Staff writer Samuel A. Church can be reached at samuel.church@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @samuelachurch.

—Staff writer Dhruv T. Patel can be reached at dhruv.patel@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @dhruvtkpatel.

—Staff writer Cam N. Srivastava can be reached at cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @camsrivastava.

—Staff writer Grace E. Yoon can be reached at grace.yoon@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @graceunkyoon.