In public statements and social media posts, President Trump has threatened Harvard University financially, calling it a “threat to democracy” and referring to its professors as “birdbrains.”
Now, Harvard lawyers are trying to use the president’s words against him in their legal fight against his administration.
On Thursday, Harvard and Trump administration attorneys will make their first in-person arguments in a Boston federal courtroom, in a case involving the administration’s attempt to ban the university from enrolling international students.
The Trump administration has argued that Harvard has given up the right to host international students on campus, citing what it says are civil rights violations, including allowing antisemitic behavior. The university’s president, Alan M. Garber, has acknowledged some problems with antisemitism but points to major steps he has taken to address it.
In the courtroom, Harvard’s strategy will use the president’s statements as evidence that the government is on a political crusade against the school. In briefs filed in the case, lawyers have argued Trump administration officials have unjustly singled out the university for punishment, violating its First Amendment rights. It has included the president’s aggressive comments as exhibits in its case.
David A. Super, a professor at Georgetown Law, says Harvard’s strategy — pointing to the president’s posts on his social media network, Truth Social — could work.
“The Truth Social posts prove a deep hostility to Harvard, and Harvard believes they also suggest that hostility is based on Harvard’s exercise of its First Amendment activity,” Mr. Super said. “So these quotes help Harvard prove its particular claims.”
At stake is a 70-year-old Harvard tradition of admitting top students from around the globe. Its notable international alumni include Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan; Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the former president of Liberia; and Masako Owada, the empress of Japan.
A visa ban would affect 7,000 students at Harvard. That includes 5,000 current students and another 2,000 in a program that allows students to stay and work for up to three years after they graduate.
The ban also affects incoming students who had expected to arrive this summer and fall.
Kirsten Weld, a Harvard professor who heads the school’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, called such a ban “an extinction-level event.”
It could also have implications beyond Harvard — further deterring international interest in studying in the United States, already ebbing following efforts by the administration this year aimed at deporting international students.
Last week, a day after the administration imposed the ban, it was temporarily blocked by Judge Allison D. Burroughs, who will preside over Thursday’s hearing. Lawyers for Harvard are asking Judge Burroughs to extend that order by issuing a preliminary injunction while the case moves through the court system.
Justice Department lawyers have not submitted any written arguments in the case. But in revoking Harvard’s right to host international students last week, Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, said the school had fostered violence and antisemitism and accused it of “coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus.” She also pointed to Harvard’s ideology and what she called its propaganda, which she described as “anti-American.”
Jewish students had complained that Harvard had failed to combat antisemitic behavior on campus, including during pro-Palestinian protests that began in 2023. In response, Harvard commissioned an internal task force report, settled legal cases with Jewish students and created new programs to address bias.
The basis for Ms. Noem’s claims involving collaboration with Chinese Communists were not entirely clear.
The ban followed an extended back and forth between Harvard and the federal government. In April, the Trump administration sent a request for information about the school’s international students, including the names of students who had been disciplined. Later, it expanded those demands, asking for footage of international students involved in demonstrations.
Harvard has said that it made efforts to provide some of the information, though it argued the requests were well outside the normal documentation required about international students. Trump administration officials were unsatisfied, however, and Ms. Noem blamed the university’s failure to comply with reporting requirements when she announced the ban.
Revoking a university’s right to host international students, which is done through a federal system known as the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, is an extraordinary measure. The government has historically done so in cases involving fraud — such as diploma mills that host would-be immigrants under the guise of providing them an education.
In court papers, lawyers for Harvard said the administration bypassed detailed procedures leading to a revocation that are clearly laid out in federal regulations. They also argue that the order last week was part of a “broader effort to retaliate against Harvard for its refusal to surrender its academic independence.”
Even before he was elected to a second term, Mr. Trump had criticized Harvard and other top universities. In a video posted during the campaign, he invoked Harvard while announcing a plan to tax university endowments and use the money to create a free online university called the American Academy. Details of that proposal have not materialized.
Ahead of Thursday’s hearing, lawyers for Harvard specifically cited four of the president’s posts on Truth Social, dated from April 15 to May 2, as evidence that his decision to revoke Harvard’s right to host international students was retaliation for the university’s failure to acquiesce to the administration’s earlier demands.
They include a threat that Harvard should lose its tax-exempt status, a claim that Harvard’s professors were “Radical left, idiots and birdbrains,” and an assertion that Harvard was a “Far Left Institution.”
In a statement to reporters on Wednesday, Mr. Trump repeated a demand that Harvard show the administration its list of international students — information the government, which issues visas, keeps in its own database.
He also said that the Ivy League should cap the international students it admits to 15 percent, introducing a new spin into the administration’s position. Currently, Harvard’s student body is about 27 percent international.
“Harvard has got to behave themselves. Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect and all they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper,” Trump told reporters gathered at the White House.
Ms. Noem’s announcement was the most recent action in a series of administration assaults on Harvard that began this year and came to a head last month, when Harvard refused to go along with a series of administration demands, including a ban on admitting students “hostile to the American values,” an audit of the political ideology of the student body and faculty to determine “viewpoint diversity,” and quarterly status updates from the school.
Columbia University had acceded to a list of demands when threatened by the Trump administration. When Harvard refused, government officials said they would freeze $2.2 billion in federal research contracts and grants with the university. Harvard filed the first of its two lawsuits, also pending before Judge Burroughs, challenging those funding cuts. The government has since announced additional funding cuts.
It is not the first time a Trump administration target is using the president’s comments to build a case against his government. In May, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell deemed unconstitutional an executive order stripping privileges, including federal building access and security clearance, from the law firm Perkins Coie.
In her order siding with the law firm, Judge Howell repeatedly referenced Mr. Trump’s statements on Truth Social as evidence that the firm, known for its work for Democratic candidates in voting rights cases, had been a victim of the president’s “ire.”
Stephanie Saul reports on colleges and universities, with a recent focus on the dramatic changes in college admissions and the debate around diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education.
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