Federal Judge Dismisses Trump Administration Antisemitism Lawsuit Against Harvard

Updated August 13, 2026, at 2:32 p.m.

A district court judge dismissed the Trump administration’s antisemitism lawsuit against Harvard on Thursday, concluding that the incidents pointed to by the government were “too isolated and episodic” to show that the University remained in violation of federal civil rights law.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard G. Stearns wrote that the government’s amended complaint focused almost entirely on incidents from the 2023-2024 school year and cited just three incidents from March 2025.

The government sued Harvard in March alleging that the University’s response to alleged antisemitism following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack was so inadequate that it constituted “deliberate indifference.” The lawsuit sought extraordinary relief, asking the court to cut off future funding to Harvard and retroactively claw back nearly $1 billion in federal grants issued.

“Without diminishing any concern arising from these occurrences, the court finds them, singly and collectively, to be too isolated and episodic to support a plausible inference that any institutionalized noncompliance with Title VI persists at Harvard to this day,” Stearns wrote.

The brief, four-page decision dealt a major blow to one of the Trump administration’s most aggressive legal attempts to hold Harvard accountable for its response to campus antisemitism — but stopped short of deciding whether the University had violated civil rights law during the tumultuous months immediately following Oct. 7.

Instead, Stearns narrowly focused on whether the government had plausibly alleged that Harvard was still violating Title VI when federal officials brought the lawsuit this year.

Harvard moved to throw out the lawsuit in May on several grounds, arguing not only that the government had failed to plausibly allege that Harvard remained in violation of civil rights law but also that the lawsuit was unlawful retaliation against the University and that there was no breach of contract between Harvard and the government.

Stearns addressed only the first argument.

“The court begins (and ends) with Harvard’s first argument,” Stearns wrote, finding that the government had not “sufficiently pled an ongoing violation of Title VI.”

In a statement to The Crimson, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet K. Dhillon touted the Civil Rights Division’s sweeping ongoing antisemitism enforcement efforts and wrote that the Department disagrees with the ruling.

“We disagree with the ruling and are assessing next steps,” she wrote.

The government had argued that even if Harvard was no longer in violation of Title VI, it could still seek damages from the period of noncompliance since upholding the civil rights law was a term of the University’s contract with the federal government.

“By continuing to receive federal financial assistance from October 7, 2023, through the present date, Harvard has bound itself to remain in compliance with Title VI for this entire, continually expanding timeframe,” the government wrote in its amended complaint.

Stearns assumed, without deciding, that the government could potentially recover previously granted funds through Title VI or a breach-of-contract theory.

But he found that the government ran into a separate statutory hurdle.

Under federal law, the government can take enforcement action only after it has notified a recipient of federal funding of the alleged failure to comply with Title VI and determined that compliance cannot be secured voluntarily.

The government provided the notice underlying the lawsuit to Harvard on June 30, 2025.

But Stearns wrote that the amended complaint contained no allegations plausibly establishing that Harvard remained out of compliance after that date.

The Justice Department had argued that requiring an ongoing violation would make it “virtually impossible for the United States to win a Title VI suit” because a defendant could bring itself into compliance once the government threatened to withhold funding.

Stearns rejected that argument, writing that the federal government “misconstrues” the purpose of an enforcement action by treating it as a punishment for past violations rather than as a means of securing future compliance.

“Congress’s intent was not to penalize a wayward funding recipient but instead to incentivize it to bring itself into compliance with Title VI,” Stearns wrote.

Stearns went further in a footnote, questioning the government’s determination that Harvard could not be brought into compliance voluntarily.

While the Justice Department argued that it had formally “determined that compliance cannot be secured by voluntary means,” Stearns wrote that federal agencies remain bound by the Administrative Procedure Act to act reasonably — and said the government had identified “no rational basis” for its conclusion.

Still, Thursday’s decision represents a different outcome from Stearns’ earlier encounters with antisemitism claims against Harvard.

In two prior lawsuits brought by Harvard Divinity School graduate Alexander “Shabbos” Kestenbaum and the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, Stearns saw merit in claims of “deliberate indifference” on Harvard’s part.

In March, legal experts told The Crimson the government’s deliberate-indifference theory faced a particularly high bar and Harvard’s subsequent reforms could make a case built around earlier conduct much harder to sustain.

When the lawsuit was first brought, Harvard pushed for the case to be tied to its federal funding litigation before district court Judge Alison Burroughs, who issued a sweeping ruling in Harvard’s favor last year. Stearns shot that effort down, finding that the case was more closely related to the prior antisemitism lawsuits than the funding saga. The Trump administration has appealed Burroughs’ ruling to the First Circuit.

Though the Justice Department tacked on new alleged antisemitism incidents to its original complaint in June, Stearns found the amended complaint remained “devoid of any factual allegations” that could plausibly establish noncompliance after Harvard received statutory notice.

Stearns made clear that Thursday’s decision was narrow.

“If comfort is needed, the court’s ruling does not have as broad an impact as the Government asserts,” he wrote.

—Staff writer Hugo C. Chiasson can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at hcc.35. Follow him on X @HugoChiassonn.

—Staff writer Elise A. Spenner can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at elisespenner.82. Follow her on X @EliseSpenner.