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    ‘Censorship’: over 115 scholars condemn cancellation of Harvard journal issue on Palestine

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    More than 115 education scholars have condemned the cancellation of an entire issue of an academic journal dedicated to Palestine by a Harvard University publisher as “censorship”.In an open letter published on Thursday, the scholars denounced the abrupt scrapping of a special issue of the Harvard Educational Review – which was first revealed by the Guardian in July – as an “attempt to silence the academic examination of the genocide, starvation and dehumanisation of Palestinian people by the state of Israel and its allies.”The writers note that the issue’s censorship is also an example of “anti-Palestinian discrimination, obstructing the dissemination of knowledge on Palestine at the height of the genocide in Gaza”.The special issue of the prestigious education journal was planned six months into Israel’s war in Gaza to tackle questions about the education of Palestinians, education about Palestine and Palestinians, and related debates in schools and colleges in the US, as the Guardian previously reported.“The field of education has an important role to play in supporting students, educators, and policymakers in contextualizing what has been happening in Gaza,” the journal’s editors wrote in their call for abstracts – which came against the backdrop of the devastation of Gaza’s educational infrastructure, including the shuttering of hundreds of schools and destruction of all of the territory’s universities.More than a year later, the special issue was just about ready – all articles had been edited, contracts with most authors had been finalized, and the issue had been advertised at academic conferences and on the back cover of the previous one. But late in the process, the Harvard Education Publishing Group, a division of the Harvard Graduate School of Education which publishes the journal, demanded that all articles be submitted to a “risk assessment” review by Harvard’s general counsel – an unprecedented demand.When the authors protested, the publisher responded by abruptly cancelling the issue altogether. In an email obtained by the Guardian, the group’s executive director, Jessica Fiorillo, cited what she described as an inadequate review process and the need for “considerable copy editing” as well as a “lack of internal alignment” about the special issue. She said that the decision was not “due to censorship of a particular viewpoint nor does it connect to matters of academic freedom”.The authors and editors flatly rejected that characterization, telling the Guardian that the cancellation set a dangerous precedent and was an example of what many scholars have come to refer to as the “Palestine exception” to academic freedom.“The decision by HEPG to abandon their own institutional mission – as well as the responsibilities that their world-leading stature demands – is scholasticide in action,” the dozens of scholars who signed the recent letter also wrote, using a term coined by Palestinian scholars to describe Israel’s “deliberate and systematic destruction” of Palestine’s educational system.“It is unconscionable that HEPG have chosen to publicly frame their cancellation of the special issue as a matter of academic quality, while omitting key publicly-reported facts that point to censorship.”Arathi Sriprakash, a professor of sociology and education at the University of Oxford and one of the letter’s signatories, told the Guardian that the special issue’s cancellation has mobilised so many education scholars “precisely because we recognise the grave consequences of such threats to academic freedom and academic integrity”.“The ongoing genocidal violence in Gaza has involved the physical destruction of the entire higher education system there, and now in many education institutions around the world there are active attempts to shut down learning about what’s happening altogether. As educationalists, we have to remain steadfast in our commitment to the pursuit of knowledge and learning without fear or threat.”‘Assault on academic freedom’The ordeal around the special Palestine issue played out against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s crackdown on US higher education institutions’ autonomy on the basis of combating alleged antisemitism on campuses.Harvard is the only university that has sued the administration in response to it cutting billions of dollars in federal funds and other punishing measures it has unleashed on universities. But internally, Harvard has pre-empted many of the administration’s demands, including by demoting scholars, scrapping initiatives giving space to Palestinian narratives and adopting a controversial definition of antisemitism that critics say is antithetical to academic inquiry.In conversations with the Harvard Educational Review editors, the journal’s publisher acknowledged that it was seeking legal review of the articles out of fears that their publication would prompt antisemitism claims, an editor at the journal said.Harvard is reportedly close to finalizing a settlement with the Trump administration along the lines of those reached by other top universities.Thea Abu El-Haj, a Palestinian-American anthropologist of education at Barnard College and one of 21 contributors to the cancelled special issue, criticized the university’s handling of the matter as yet another sign of institutional capitulation.“If the universities – or in this case a university press – are not willing to stand up for what is core to their mission, I don’t know what they’re doing,” she told the Guardian last month. “What’s the point?”A spokesperson for the Harvard Graduate School of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the latest letter but in an earlier statement to the Guardian wrote that the publisher “remains deeply committed to our robust editorial process”.Last month, the free speech group PEN America also condemned the special issue’s cancellation as a “blatant assault on academic freedom”.“Canceling an entire issue so close to publication is highly unusual, virtually unheard of,” Kristen Shahverdian, the program director for the group’s Campus Free Speech initiative, said in a statement.“Silencing these scholarly voices robs academics, students, and the public of the opportunity to engage with their insights. It also sends a chilling message in the context of the Trump administration’s unrelenting pressure on Harvard University and mounting political interference in higher education, including efforts that target scholarship on Palestine.” More

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      Trump administration threatens to strip Harvard University of lucrative patents

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      The latest phase of the Trump administration’s offensive against Harvard University is a comprehensive review of the university’s federally funded research programs, and the threat to strip the school’s lucrative portfolio of patents.In a letter to the Harvard president, Alan Garber, posted online on Friday, Donald Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, accused Harvard of breaching its legal and contractual requirements tied to federally funded research programs and patents.Lutnick also said the commerce department has begun a “march-in” process under the federal Bayh-Dole Act that could let the government take ownership of the patents or grant licenses.“The Department places immense value on the groundbreaking scientific and technological advancements that emerge from the Government’s partnerships with institutions like Harvard,” Lutnick wrote.He said that carried a “critical responsibility” for Harvard to ensure that its intellectual property derived from federal funding is used to maximize benefits to the American people.Harvard did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Friday’s letter ratchets up White House pressure on Harvard, which it has accused of civil rights violations for failing to take steps dictated by the administration in response to accusations that student protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza were antisemitic.Harvard sued in April after the administration began stripping or freezing billions of dollars of federal research money.In his letter, Lutnick demanded that Harvard provide within four weeks a list of all patents stemming from federally funded research grants, including how the patents are used and whether any licensing requires “substantial US manufacturing”.As of 1 July 2024, Harvard held more than 5,800 patents, and had more than 900 technology licenses with over 650 industry partners, according to the Harvard Office of Technology Development.Other universities faced with federal research funding losses have signed settlement agreements with the government, including Columbia University, which agreed to pay more than $220m, and Brown University, which agreed to pay $50m.Harvard’s president reportedly told faculty that a New York Times report that the university was open to spending up to $500m to settle with the government was inaccurate and had been leaked to reporters by White House officials.The bipartisan Bayh-Dole Act was sponsored by senators Birch Bayh of Indiana and Bob Dole of Kansas and signed into law by Jimmy Carter near the end of his term.Carter said at the time it was important that industrial innovation promote US economic health, and the legislation “goes far toward strengthening the effectiveness of the patent incentive in stimulating innovation in the United States”.Many civil rights experts, faculty and White House critics believe the Trump administration’s targeting of schools for supposedly failing to address antisemitism is a pretext to assert federal control and threaten academic freedom and free speech. More

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      Harvard argues in court that Trump administration’s $2.6bn cuts are illegal

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      Harvard University appeared in federal court on Monday to make the case that the Trump administration illegally cut $2.6bn from the storied college – a major test of the administration’s efforts to reshape higher education institutions by threatening their financial viability.US district judge Allison Burroughs heard arguments from Harvard and the Department of Justice. The cuts, imposed earlier this year, have halted major research efforts and Harvard argues they are a politically motivated attempt to pressure the school into adopting federal policies on student conduct, admissions, antisemitism and diversity.A ruling in favor of the university would revive Harvard’s sprawling scientific and medical research operation and hundreds of projects that lost federal money.“This case involves the government’s efforts to use the withholding of federal funding as leverage to gain control of academic decisionmaking at Harvard,” the university said in its complaint. “All told, the tradeoff put to Harvard and other universities is clear: allow the government to micromanage your academic institution or jeopardize the institution’s ability to pursue medical breakthroughs, scientific discoveries, and innovative solutions.”The case is being closely watched by other universities that have seen their research funds axed by the administration, which has suspended or threatened billions in grants and contracts from several institutions. The White House is reportedly close to finalizing a deal with Columbia University – the first institution it targeted for cuts – to restore $400m in funding in exchange for the university implementing a series of measures meeting the administration’s ideological demands.Harvard is the first – and so far only – university to sue.The university has separately sued the administration over its revocation of Harvard’s eligibility to host international students. (Trump has also threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, but he has taken no action to that effect so far.)Burroughs is overseeing both of Harvard’s cases against the administration and in June issued an injunction stopping the government from barring foreign Harvard students from entering the country.Monday’s hearing was the first time the court heard arguments about the legality of the administration’s funding cuts. The hearing ended without Burroughs issuing a ruling from the bench. A ruling is expected later in writing.Harvard’s lawsuit accuses Donald Trump’s administration of waging a retaliation campaign against the university after it rejected a series of demands in an 11 April letter from a federal antisemitism taskforce.The letter demanded sweeping changes related to campus protests, academics and admissions. For example, the letter told Harvard to audit the viewpoints of students and faculty and admit more students or hire new professors if the campus was found to lack diverse points of view. The letter was meant to address government accusations that the university had become a hotbed of liberalism and tolerated anti-Jewish harassment on campus.A lawyer for the government, Michael Velchik, said in court on Monday that the government has authority to cancel research grants when an institution is out of compliance with the president’s directives. He said episodes at Harvard violated Trump’s order combating antisemitism.Burroughs pushed back, questioning how the government could make “ad-hoc” decisions to cancel grants and do so across Harvard without offering evidence that any of the research is antisemitic.She also argued the government had provided “no documentation, no procedure” to “suss out” whether Harvard administrators “have taken enough steps or haven’t” to combat antisemitism.“The consequences of that in terms of constitutional law are staggering,” Burroughs said during Monday’s hearing. “I don’t think you can justify a contract action based on impermissible suppression of speech. Where do I have that wrong.”Velchik said the case comes down to the government’s choosing how best to spend billions of dollars in research funding.“Harvard claims the government is anti-Harvard. I reject that,” Velchik said. “The government is pro-Jewish students at Harvard. The government is pro-Jewish faculty at Harvard.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlan Garber, Harvard’s president, pledged to fight antisemitism but 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”.The same day Harvard rejected the demands, Trump officials moved to freeze $2.2bn in research grants. Linda McMahon, the US education secretary, declared in May that Harvard would no longer be eligible for new grants, and weeks later the administration began canceling contracts with Harvard.As Harvard fought the funding freeze in court, individual agencies began sending letters announcing that the frozen research grants were being terminated. They cited a clause that allows grants to be scrapped if they no longer align with government policies.Harvard, which has the nation’s largest endowment at $53bn, has moved to self-fund some of its research, but warned it can’t absorb the full cost of the federal cuts.In court filings, the school said the government “fails to explain how the termination of funding for research to treat cancer, support veterans, and improve national security addresses antisemitism”.The Trump administration denies the cuts were made in retaliation, saying the grants were under review even before the April demand letter was sent. It argues the government has wide discretion to cancel contracts for policy reasons.“It is the policy of the United States under the Trump administration not to fund institutions that fail to adequately address antisemitism in their programs,” it said in court documents.Last month, the Trump administration formally issued a finding that the school tolerated antisemitism – a step that eventually could jeopardize all of Harvard’s federal funding, including federal student loans or grants. The penalty is typically referred to as a “death sentence”.While Harvard’s cases against the administration proceeds in court, the university is reportedly also negotiating with the administration for a deal that might end the dispute out of court. More

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      US judge blocks Trump plan to bar international students from Harvard

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      A federal judge on Monday blocked Donald Trump’s administration from implementing his plan to bar foreign nationals from entering the United States to study at Harvard University.US district judge Allison Burroughs in Boston issued an injunction barring Trump’s administration from carrying out its latest bid to curtail Harvard’s ability to host international students amid an escalating fight pitting the Republican president against the prestigious Ivy League school.The preliminary injunction extends a temporary order the judge issued on 5 June that prevented the administration from enforcing a proclamation Trump signed a day earlier that cited national security concerns to justify why Harvard could no longer be trusted to host international students.The proclamation prohibited foreign nationals from entering the US to study at Harvard or participate in exchange visitor programs for an initial period of six months, and directed Marco Rubio to consider whether to revoke visas of international students already enrolled at Harvard.Almost 6,800 international students attended Harvard in its most recent school year, making up about 27% of the student population of the university in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Trump signed the proclamation after his administration had already frozen billions of dollars in funding to the oldest and wealthiest US university, threatened Harvard’s tax-exempt status and launched several investigations into the school.Trump on Friday said his administration could announce a deal with Harvard “over the next week or so” to resolve the White House’s campaign against the university, which has waged a legal battle against the administration’s action.Harvard alleges that Trump is retaliating against it in violation of its free speech rights under the US constitution’s first amendment for refusing to accede to the administration’s demands to control the school’s governance, curriculum and the ideology of its faculty and students.The university has filed two separate lawsuits before Burroughs seeking to unfreeze around $2.5bn in funding and to prevent the administration from blocking the ability of international students to attend the university.The latter lawsuit was filed after Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, on 22 May announced that her department was immediately revoking Harvard’s student and exchange visitor program certification, which allows it to enroll foreign students.Noem, without providing evidence, accused the university of “fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party”.Her action was temporarily blocked by Burroughs almost immediately. While the Department of Homeland Security has since shifted to challenging Harvard’s certification through a months-long administrative process, Burroughs at a 29 May hearing said she planned to issue an injunction to maintain the status quo, which she did officially on Friday.A week after the hearing, Trump signed his proclamation, which cited concerns about Harvard’s acceptance of foreign money including from China and what it said was an inadequate response by the school to his administration’s demand for information on foreign students.His administration has accused Harvard of creating an unsafe environment for Jewish students and allowing antisemitism to fester on its campus. Protests over US ally Israel’s treatment of Palestinians during its war in Gaza have roiled numerous universities’ campuses, including Harvard’s.Rights advocates have noted rising antisemitism and Islamophobia in the US due to the war. The Trump administration has thus far announced no action over anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate.Harvard’s own antisemitism and Islamophobia task forces found widespread fear and bigotry at the university in reports released in late April. More

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      What Happens to Harvard If Trump Successfully Bars Its International Students?

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      If President Trump makes good on all his threats, Harvard may lose much of its influence and prestige. It could also become even harder to afford.As President Trump and his team dialed up the pressure on Harvard University last month, threatening to bar its international students, the school issued what was at once a warning and a plea.“Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard,” school officials wrote in a lawsuit asking a judge to stop the federal government’s actions.It left unsaid what Harvard, if it were no longer Harvard, would become.It’s a scenario that some inside Harvard are beginning to imagine and plan for as the Trump administration lobs attacks from all angles, seeking to cut the university off from both students and billions of dollars in federal funding.Top leaders at Harvard, one of the nation’s oldest universities, including its provost, John F. Manning, a conservative legal scholar who once clerked for the former Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, are meeting more frequently to strategize.The school’s board of trustees, the Harvard Corporation, has discussed whether hundreds, if not thousands, of people will need to be laid off.And on 8:30 a.m. Zoom calls once or twice a week, administrative officials meet with senior leaders of Harvard’s undergraduate and graduate schools to share updates about the latest Trump developments, which keep coming rapid-fire.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s war on Harvard was decades in the making. This letter proves it | Bernard Harcourt

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      On the shelf in my library, I have an autographed copy of a book written by a former Republican congressman from New York, John LeBoutillier, titled Harvard Hates America: The Odyssey of a Born-Again American. It was published in 1978, two years before LeBoutillier was elected to Congress – and decades before the Trump administration’s assault on the institution. But its message is familiar in 2025.The book is a scathing criticism of Harvard University, in large part over its supposed left-leaning professors who allegedly indoctrinate their undergraduates. Its thrust is straightforward: Harvard is America’s problem.Today, the blueprint for Donald Trump’s attack on Harvard, Columbia and other liberal arts colleges and universities can be found in another text: Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, a guide to rightwing government reform published in April 2023 by the Heritage Foundation – over a year before any encampments went up on Columbia’s campus. But the Republican ambition to subjugate Harvard and Columbia traces further back, at least to the 1970s, when it became apparent that college-educated voters favored the Democratic party.My copy of Harvard Hates America is autographed and dedicated to two constituents. And I recently stumbled on something tucked into the fold: a letter that LeBoutillier enclosed to the recipients of his gift. On House of Representatives stationery, LeBoutillier wrote:
      Long after I had graduated from Harvard and was a freshman member of Congress, I realized just how terrible some of the people educating our young are; they are not only liberals, but they use their “power” over their students to preach an anti-American leftist point of view. And this is not confined to Harvard. Indeed, this is a disease spreading throughout the academic world.
      I believe that this politicalization of education threatens this country. And, coupled with a bias so obviously evident in the media, makes it difficult for we conservatives to get our message across.
      Well, I’m going to continue to fight for our point of view and our principles.
      Enjoy the book.
      LeBoutillier was not alone in these sentiments. In a taped conversation with Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig Jr in the Oval Office on 14 December 1972, President Richard Nixon attacked university professors, claiming they were the enemy. His rhetoric was characteristically colorful: “The professors are the enemy. Professors are the enemy. Write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it.”Conservatives like the journalist Irving Kristol, the philosopher Allan Bloom, and Ronald Reagan’s education secretary, William Bennett, would perpetuate the criticisms of supposedly left-leaning universities in the 1980s. And there is a straight line from those attacks in the 1970s and 80s to the Trump administration.View image in fullscreenIn a speech titled “The universities are the enemy” and delivered at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida, on 2 November 2021, JD Vance declared: “I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” Vance would then add, quoting Nixon: “There is a wisdom in what Richard Nixon said approximately 40 to 50 years ago. He said, and I quote, ‘The professors are the enemy.’”The Heritage Foundation picked up the baton in a 43-page chapter on education in the Project 2025 text. Remarkably, the Trump administration’s continuing assault on Harvard, Columbia and other universities is unfolding line-by-line, chapter and verse, from that script.So, right after a federal judge in Boston blocked the Department of Homeland Security from revoking Harvard University’s ability to enroll foreign students, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, announced that the administration intended to revoke the visas of Chinese students, especially those with ties to the Chinese Communist party. On page 355 of its Mandate for Leadership, Project 2025 calls for “Confronting the Chinese Communist Party’s Influence on Higher Education.”At a press conference in the Oval Office on 30 May 2025, Trump attacked Harvard and said he would redirect the school’s grants to vocational education. “I’d like to see the money go to trade schools,” Trump said. The remark, again, came straight out of the Project 2025 playbook, which states on pages 15-16 and 319 that the federal government should prioritize “trade schools” and “career schools” over the “woke-dominated system” of universities.The Trump administration demanded that Columbia’s Middle Eastern, South Asian and African studies program be placed “under academic receivership”. Again, straight out of the playbook. Project 2025 calls on page 356 for “wind[ing] down so-called ‘area studies’ programs at universities”.Trump signed executive orders on inauguration day banning diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and “gender ideology” at institutions such as universities that receive federal funding. Again, textbook material. Project 2025 argued on page 322, regarding educational institutions, that “enforcement of civil rights should be based on a proper understanding of those laws, rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory”.In fact, the first line of the chapter on education in Project 2025 says it all: “The federal Department of Education should be eliminated.”Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist behind the attack on critical race theory and gender studies, has openly described the Republican attack on universities as a “counter-revolution” planned well before the campus protests. The Republican offensive traces back at least to the rise of the Black Lives Matter and abolition movements in the wake of the police killings of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, George Floyd and others. “It’s a revolution against revolution,” Rufo admitted, adding: “I think that actually we are a counter-radical force in American life that, paradoxically, has to use what many see as radical techniques.”And what the Trump administration has accomplished with its ongoing assault on Harvard and Columbia is the “prototype” of that wider counter-revolution. Rufo is explicit about this. “If you take Columbia University as really the first trial of this strategy, we’ve seen an enormous payoff,” he said. “I’d like to see that prototype industrialized and applied to all of the universities as a sector.”Given this history tracing back to the 1970s, it is puzzling why people continue to believe that the Republicans are trying to reform the universities to address antisemitism. It should be clear that their actions are instead part of a decades-long effort to humble universities for political reasons, namely to counter the trend that college-educated people tend to vote Democratic. Nixon was frank about this. That’s what made professors the enemy.On top of that, of course, there is profit and political economy. At the press conference last week, Trump admitted why he wants to shift education funding to trade schools.Encouraged by billionaire Elon Musk at his side, Trump said: “I’d like to see trade schools set up, because you could take $5bn plus hundreds of billions more, which is what is spent [on research universities], and you could have the greatest trade school system anywhere in the world. And that’s what we need to build his rockets and robots and things that he’s doing” – pointing to Musk.Trump could not have been more explicit. “We probably found our pot of gold,” Trump adds, “and that is what has been wasted at places like Harvard.”The Trump administration has seen some successes in its counter-revolution against higher education. So far, the lower federal courts have run interference. But there have been major casualties already, especially in the funding of sciences and medical research, academic integrity and autonomy, and area studies. Faculty governance at some universities has also been diminished, at some universities decimated.Anyone who is genuinely interested in understanding what the Trump administration is up to and to anticipate its next moves should return to books like Harvard Hates America and then read Project 2025’s chapter on education. It clearly explains the past four months and predicts the future – one in which the federal government will sacrifice liberal arts colleges and universities to the benefit of trade schools, faith-based institutions and military academies.The path ahead also includes, in all likelihood, eliminating the American Bar Association as an accrediting system (page 359), as well as the other actors in the “federal accreditation cartel” (pages 320 and 355); terminating the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program (page 354), phasing out income-driven repayment plans (page 337), and privatizing student loans (page 340); allocating at least 40% of federal funding of education “to international business programs that teach about free markets and economics” (page 356); and a host of other radical proposals.It is time now to be honest about the decades-long history of the Republican assault on higher education. Too many of the university leaders who are negotiating with the Trump administration about campus protest are naive at best and fail to grasp the stakes of the ongoing counterrevolution – or complicit at worst. In the process, they are undermining their universities and violating their fiduciary duties to their constituents – students, alumni, faculty and staff. By capitulating based on a pretext, a feint in military terms, those leaders have sacrificed the integrity of the research enterprise and the autonomy of the academy.Liberal arts colleges and universities are a gem in the US, envied by people around the world. Their strength lies in fostering critical thought, creativity and inventiveness throughout the humanities, social sciences, and natural and applied sciences. A liberal arts education, at its best, cultivates critical thinking that challenges society’s strengths and weaknesses, and asks how to make the world more just with more freedom for everyone. Those are the true aims of higher education.

      Bernard E Harcourt is a professor of law and political science at Columbia University in New York City and a directeur d’études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the author most recently of “A Modern Counterrevolution” in The Ideas Letter More

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      Federal prosecutor reportedly quit over concern Ábrego García indictment was politically motivated – as it happened

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      A career federal prosecutor resigned in protest the same day that charges were filed against Kilmar Ábrego García, following an investigation that apparently began after the mistaken deportation of the Maryland resident became a legal and political headache for the Trump administration, ABC News reports.Ben Schrader, announced his resignation as the chief of the criminal division at the US attorney’s office for the Middle District of Tennessee in a LinkedIn post on 21 May, the same day the indictment of Ábrego García was signed by the acting US attorney for that district.Sources told ABC News that Schrader stepped down because of concerns that the case was being pursued for political reasons.“Earlier today, after nearly 15 years as an Assistant United States Attorney, I resigned as Chief of the Criminal Division at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Tennessee”, Schrader wrote on LinkedIn that day. “It has been an incredible privilege to serve as a prosecutor with the Department of Justice, where the only job description I’ve ever known is to do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons. I wish all of my colleagues at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville and across the Department the best as they seek to do justice on behalf of the American people.”At a news conference on Friday, the attorney general, Pam Bondi, refused to say exactly when the investigation that led to the charges was opened, but she told reporters that the indictment was based on “recently found facts” about a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee, and that “thanks to the bright light that has been shined on Ábrego García, this investigation continued”.The indictment was signed by Robert McGuire, who has been the acting US attorney in Nashville since December, and three senior prosecutors from the justice department’s Joint Task Force Vulcan, which was created during the first Trump administration “to dismantle MS-13”.This brings our live coverage of the second Trump administration to a close for the day. Here are some of the latest developments:

      Kilmar Ábrego García, a Maryland resident who was deported to El Salvador in violation of a court order, was returned to the United States and charged with the criminal smuggling of undocumented immigrants inside the United States.

      Ben Schrader, a career federal prosecutor, reportedly resigned in protest the same day that charges were filed against Ábrego García, following an investigation that apparently began after the mistaken deportation became a legal and political headache for the Trump administration.

      Donald Trump suggested that court orders to his administration to return Ábrego García to the US was a sign that “the judges are trying to take the place of a president that won in a landslide”.

      One day after his feud with Elon Musk exploded Trump claimed that he was far too busy to think about the billionaire donor who had accused him of sex crimes and called for his impeachment. That claim was undermined by the fact that Trump spent a chunk of his morning on the phone with at least three television reporters, gossiping about Musk.

      Two federal appeals court judges appointed by Trump overturned a lower court ruling to allow him to resume punishing the Associated Press for continuing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico by that name instead of the new one Trump gave it.
      Two judges appointed by Donald Trump to a federal appeals court ruled in his favor on Friday, allowing him to resume blocking the Associated Press from covering him at events in the Oval Office, on Air Force One and in his Mar-A-Lago club.The 2-1 ruling was written by US circuit judge Neomi Rao, who served in Trump’s first administration, and joined by fellow Trump appointee Gregory Katsas.The divided ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit temporarily blocks an order by another Trump appointed judge, US district judge Trevor McFadden, who had ruled in April that the Trump administration had to allow AP journalists access to events while the news agency’s lawsuit moves forward.The AP sued after Trump banned the news organization for refusing to follow him in referring to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.The court left in place part of a lower-court order that required Trump to give AP access to events held in larger spaces, like the East Room of the White House.The Department of Homeland Security conducted raids on multiple locations across Los Angeles on Friday, clashing with the crowds of people who gathered to protest.Masked agents were recorded pulling several people out of two LA-area Home Depot stores and the clothing manufacturer Ambient Apparel’s headquarters in LA’s Fashion District.There has not yet been confirmation of how many people were taken into custody, but initial estimates provided by news helicopter reports shows roughly two dozen people were loaded into white vans and taken away.Armed agents clad in heavy protective and tactical gear, including some who wore gas masks, could also be seen pushing individuals and trying to corral large groups that congregated to challenge the raids, and smoke grenades were reportedly thrown near the crowds. Pepper spray was used as the federal officers attempted to clear the area.Speaking to reporters on Air Force One on Friday, Donald Trump suggested that some sort of unspecified action needed to be taken against federal judges who ordered his administration to bring the wrongly deported Maryland resident Kilmar Ábrego García back from El Salvador.Trump continued to insist that the supreme court’s order requiring his administration to bring Ábrego García back to the United States was incorrect. “He should’ve never had to be returned”, Trump said. “Either way it’s a total disaster – this is a pretty bad guy.”In comments posted on YouTube by the Washington Post, Trump seemed to give insight into the political calculation behind his administration’s decision to bring Ábrego García back, as the supreme court had ordered, but first indict him on new criminal charges.“I could see a decision being made” Trump said, “‘bring him back; show everybody how horrible this guy is’”.He then returned to his outrage at federal judges for not allowing him to deport people like Ábrego García who have been accused of crimes without giving them an opportunity to challenge the evidence against them in court.“Frankly, we have to do something, because the judges are trying to take the place of a president that won in a landslide” Trump said. “And that’s not supposed to be the way it is”.Trump seems convinced that Ábrego García is so obviously a gang member that there is no need for a trial. However, the president demonstrated in April that he is deeply confused about at least one piece of the supposed evidence.In a social media post in mid-April, Trump held up a photograph of the tattoos on Ábrego García’s hand, symbols that one corner of the internet is convinced represent the letters and numbers M,S,1 and 3, to signify that he is a member of the gang MS-13.In an interview with Terry Moran of ABC News two weeks later, though, Trump revealed that he had been confused by the photograph, which added the letters and numbers as a form of annotation. “He had MS-13 on his knuckles, tattooed”, Trump insisted to Moran. When Moran pointed out that the letters and numbers had been added to the photograph he held up to illustrate what people thought the four symbols represented, Trump made it clear that he had mistaken the annotation for part of the tattoo. “Go look at his hand”, Trump said.Now that Ábrego García is back in the United States and will be in court, new photographs of his hand will soon be available for Trump to inspect.During a brief news conference on Air Force One, en route to his golf course in New Jersey, Donald Trump told reporters that he has been far too busy to spend any time thinking about Elon Musk, his top donor and former aide who called for him to be impeached on Thursday.“Honestly, I’ve been so busy working on China, working on Russia, working on Iran, working on so many things, I’m not thinking about Elon” Trump said. “I just wish him well.”The president’s comment, one day after Musk accused him of having been involved in his late friend Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes, oddly echoed Trump’s response to a question about Epstein’s longtime companion, Ghislaine Maxwell, in 2020 when she was arrested and charged with helping Epstein recruit and sexually abuse girls.Back then, when Trump was asked during a coronavirus briefing in the White House if he expected Maxwell “to turn in powerful men”, he responded: “I don’t know, I haven’t really been following it too much. I just wish her well, frankly.”“I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach, and I guess they lived in Palm Beach. But I wish her well, whatever it is.”Maxwell was convicted in 2021 and sentenced to 20 years in jail the following year. Her prosecution was led by Damian Williams, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York. Williams later oversaw the indictment on New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, on corruption charges that were later dropped by the Trump administration.On Friday, Williams left the law firm Paul Weiss to join Jenner & Block, moving from a firm that struck a deal with Trump to one that fought him in court.Trump’s claim that he was far too busy on Friday to concern himself with Musk’s criticism was slightly undermined by the fact that he spent much of his morning at the White House talking about Musk to multiple reporters on the phone. When Jonathan Karl of ABC News called the president at 6:45 am, Trump picked up to talk about Musk and called him “a man who has lost his mind”. Trump also took time to tell Bret Baier of Fox, “Elon has totally lost it”. Trump also spoke to CNN’s Dana Bash, to insist: “I’m not even thinking about Elon, he’s got a problem, the poor guy’s got a problem”. Bash said that Trump also told her he wishes Elon well.Donald Trump, who is again enjoying a long weekend at one of his golf courses, took a moment to respond, obliquely, to Elon Musk’s unsourced claim on Thursday that the Trump administration has not released all of the files from the sex-trafficking investigation into Jeffrey Epstein because Trump is implicated in his late friend’s crimes.During an Air Force One flight to New Jersey on Friday, Trump shared a comment from David Schoen, a lawyer who defended the president at his second impeachment trial in 2021, over the January 6 riot.“I was hired to lead Jeffrey Epstein’s defense as his criminal lawyer 9 days before he died”, Schoen wrote on Musk’s social media platform X on Thursday. “He sought my advice for months before that. I can say authoritatively, unequivocally, and definitively that he had no information to hurt President Trump. I specifically asked him!”Following Musk’s post on Thursday, which was viewed more than 200 million times (according to Musk’s company), Schoen also wrote on the billionaire’s platform: “I can tell you unequivocally as someone who would know that President Trump never did anything wrong with Jeffrey Epstein.”A career federal prosecutor resigned in protest the same day that charges were filed against Kilmar Ábrego García, following an investigation that apparently began after the mistaken deportation of the Maryland resident became a legal and political headache for the Trump administration, ABC News reports.Ben Schrader, announced his resignation as the chief of the criminal division at the US attorney’s office for the Middle District of Tennessee in a LinkedIn post on 21 May, the same day the indictment of Ábrego García was signed by the acting US attorney for that district.Sources told ABC News that Schrader stepped down because of concerns that the case was being pursued for political reasons.“Earlier today, after nearly 15 years as an Assistant United States Attorney, I resigned as Chief of the Criminal Division at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Tennessee”, Schrader wrote on LinkedIn that day. “It has been an incredible privilege to serve as a prosecutor with the Department of Justice, where the only job description I’ve ever known is to do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons. I wish all of my colleagues at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville and across the Department the best as they seek to do justice on behalf of the American people.”At a news conference on Friday, the attorney general, Pam Bondi, refused to say exactly when the investigation that led to the charges was opened, but she told reporters that the indictment was based on “recently found facts” about a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee, and that “thanks to the bright light that has been shined on Ábrego García, this investigation continued”.The indictment was signed by Robert McGuire, who has been the acting US attorney in Nashville since December, and three senior prosecutors from the justice department’s Joint Task Force Vulcan, which was created during the first Trump administration “to dismantle MS-13”.In a new statement, Senator Chris Van Hollen, the Maryland Democrat who visited Kilmar Ábrego García in El Salvador, reiterated the point he made after his trip in April, when he said that he was “not defending the man” but “defending the rights of this man to due process”.Here is Van Hollen’s new statement:
      “For months the Trump Administration flouted the Supreme Court and our Constitution. Today, they appear to have finally relented to our demands for compliance with court orders and with the due process rights afforded to everyone in the United States. As I have repeatedly said, this is not about the man, it’s about his constitutional rights – and the rights of all. The Administration will now have to make its case in the court of law, as it should have all along.”
      This restates what Van Hollen said in an interview with ABC News in April, of the Trump administration: “Here’s where they should put their facts: they should oput it before the court. They should put up or shut up in court.”El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, joined the White House in attacking Senator Chris Van Hollen on social media with a post on Elon Musk’s X in which he referred back to a staged photograph of the Maryland senator’s meeting Kilmar Ábrego García in April.Referencing the release of Ábrego García from custody in El Salvador on Friday, Bukele wrote: we work with the Trump administration, and if they request the return of a gang member to face charges, of course we wouldn’t refuse.”He added: “No more margaritas under custody”.On his return from El Salvador in April, however, Van Hollen accused the government of El Salvador of creating the hoax he called “Margarita-gate”, by placing a pair of cocktail glasses on the table between himself and Ábrego García as they met to make it look as though they were enjoying drinks.Those photographs were posted on X by Bukele, along with a caption that downplayed the seriousness of the situation by falsely claiming that the senator and the wrongly deported man had been “sipping margaritas” as they met.But the senator said that the drinks were placed there during the meeting by someone from the Salvadoran government before the photographs were taken and that neither he nor Ábrego García had touched them. Van Hollen pointed out that there was visual evidence for this in the photographs: the rims of both glasses were covered in salt or sugar, but it was clear from the images that neither glass had been drunk from, since the rims were undisturbed.The US supreme court on Friday permitted the so-called ‘department of government efficiency’, or Doge, a team set up by former Trump aide Elon Musk to take a chainsaw to the federal workforce, broad access to personal information on millions of Americans in Social Security Administration data systems while a legal challenge plays out, Reuters reports.At the request of the Justice Department, the justices put on hold US district judge Ellen Hollander’s order that had largely blocked Doge’s access to “personally identifiable information” in data such as medical and financial records while litigation proceeds in a lower court. Hollander found that allowing Doge unfettered access likely would violate a federal privacy law.The court’s brief, unsigned order did not provide a rationale for siding with Doge. The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Its three liberal justices dissented from the order.White House officials have wasted no time in using the newly announced criminal charges against Kilmar Ábrego García to attack Democrats who objected to his deportation without due process in violation of a previous court order.Writing on Elon Musk’s social media platform X, the White House’s official account dedicated to partisan “rapid response” resurfaced an April post from Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat whose constituents include Ábrego García’s wife, to suggest that he should now be ashamed of having stood up for the undocumented Maryland resident’s due process rights.“A grand jury found his full-time job was human smuggling, Chris,” the White House account commented. “He spent his entire life abusing people – including women and children. This is who you spent so much time defending. Shame on you.”The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, also using the platform owned by a former Trump aide who called for the president to be impeached just yesterday, claimed that the indictment against Ábrego García “proves the unhinged Democrat Party was wrong, and their stenographers in the Fake News Media were once again played like fools”.Apparently unaware that the allegations have yet to be tested in court, the president’s chief spokesperson insisted that “Democrat lawmakers” including Van Hollen, “and every single so-called ‘journalist’ who defended this illegal criminal abuser must immediately apologize to Garcia’s victims”.At a news conference, the US attorney general, Pamela Bondi, just announced that Kilmar Ábrego García, a Maryland resident who was deported to El Salvador in violation of a court order, has been returned to the United States and charged with criminal charges related to smuggling undocumented immigrants inside the United States.Bondi said that the US government presented an arrest warrant for Ábrego García to El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele.She also said that the grand jury indictment on 21 May was based on recently discovered facts and that the grand jury “found that over the past nine years, Ábrego García has played a significant role in an alien smuggling ring.”“Upon completion of his sentence, we anticipate he will be returned to his country of El Salvador”, Bondi said.Bondi suggested that Ábrego García was involved in other crimes, based on what unnamed co-conspirators allege, but he was only indicted on two counts related to the alleged smuggling.In response to a reporter’s question, Bondi said that Ábrego García would serve a prison sentence in the US if convicted, on charges that carry a possible sentence of 10 years, and then be deported to El Salvador again.We are waiting for the start of a livestreamed justice department news conference, which is expected to deal with the indictment of Kilmar Ábrego García, a Maryland resident who was deported to El Salvador and is reportedly on his way back to the United States to face new criminal charges stemming from a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee which prompted officers to suspect that he might have been transporting undocumented migrants.The criminal indictment, which was filed on 21 May, accuses Ábrego García of being “a member and associate” of the Salvadoran gang MS-13 and charges him with taking part in a conspiracy to transport undocumented immigrants inside the United States.The reportedly imminent return to the United States of Kilmar Ábrego García, a Maryland resident who was deported to El Salvador in violation of a court order that he should not be sent there because he had a reasonable fear of persecution in that country, comes nearly two months after the attorney general, Pamela Jo Bondi, insisted that it would never happen.“He is not coming back to our country” Bondi told reporters at a news conference on 16 April. “President Bukele said he was not sending him back. That’s the end of the story.”Asked if she could provide evidence that he was a member of the MS-13 gang, Bondi said only that the allegation was contained in a 2019 court hearing.Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man unlawfully deported to El Salvador, is on his way back to the US where he will face criminal charges, ABC News is reporting, citing sources.A federal grand jury has indicted Ábrego García for allegedly transporting undocumented migrants within the US, according to the report.The outlet, citing sources, reports that a two-count indictment, filed under seal in federal court in Tennessee last month, alleges that Ábrego García participated in a years-long conspiracy to transport undocumented migrants from Texas to the interior of the country.Among those allegedly transported were members of the Salvadoran gang MS-13, according to the report. The alleged conspiracy spanned nearly a decade, according to the report.A US trade delegation including three cabinet officials will meet with trade representatives from China in London on Monday “with reference to the trade deal”, Donald Trump has announced.He posted on Truth Social:
      I am pleased to announce that Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, and United States Trade Representative, Ambassador Jamieson Greer, will be meeting in London on Monday, June 9, 2025, with Representatives of China, with reference to the Trade Deal. The meeting should go very well. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
      It comes a day after Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping held a “very good” phone call during which they discussed “some of the intricacies of our recently made, and agreed to, Trade Deal”, Trump said.Trump also said Xi had invited him to visit China, an invitation he aid he reciprocated.Xi said of the call that a “consensus has been reached”, adding that the two sides “should enhance consensus” as well as “reduce misunderstanding, strengthen cooperation” and “enhance exchanges”. “Dialogue, cooperation is the only right choice for China and the US,” the Chinese president said.Elon Musk may believe his money bought the presidential election and the House of the Representatives for the Republicans. But he is discovering painfully and quickly that it has not bought him love, loyalty or even fear among many GOP members of Congress on Capitol Hill.Faced with the choice of siding with Musk, the world’s richest man, or Donald Trump, after the two staged a public relationship breakdown for the ages on Thursday, most Republicans went with the man in the Oval Office, who has shown an unerring grasp of the tactics of political intimidation and who remains the world’s most powerful figure even without the boss of Tesla and SpaceX by his side.The billionaire tech entrepreneur, who poured about $275m into Trump’s campaign last year, tried to remind Washington’s political classes of his financial muscle on Thursday during an outpouring of slights against a man for whom he had once professed platonic love and was still showering with praise up until a week before.One after another, Republican House members came out to condemn him and defend Trump, despite having earlier been told by Musk that “you know you did wrong” in voting for what has become Trump’s signature legislation that seeks to extend vast tax cuts for the rich.Troy Nehls, a GOP representative from Texas, captured the tone, addressing Musk before television cameras:
      You’ve lost your damn mind. Enough is enough. Stop this.
      It chimed with the sentiments of many others. “Nobody elected Elon Musk, and a whole lot of people don’t even like him, to be honest with you, even on both sides,” Jeff Van Drew, a New Jersey congressman, told Axios.“We’re getting people calling our offices 100% in support of President Trump,” Kevin Hern, a representative from Oklahoma, told the site.
      Every tweet that goes out, people are more lockstep behind President Trump and [Musk is] losing favour.
      Republicans were balancing the strength of Trump’s voice among GOP voters versus the power of the increasingly unpopular Musk’s money – and most had little doubt which matters most.“On the value of Elon playing against us in primaries compared to Trump endorsing us in primaries, the latter is 100 times more relevant,” Axios quoted one unnamed representative as saying.The Trump administration is preparing to make good on the president’s threat to strip “large scale” federal funding from California, an effort that could begin as early as Friday, according to CNN.The report says agencies have been directed to start identifying grants the administration can withhold from the state. A whistleblower reportedly told a congressional committee that the administration was planning to cut all research grants to California.The White House has not commented on the plans. The timeline remains speculative, and it is unclear what grants would be targeted.Trump has repeatedly threatened to cut federal funding as a way to force states, institutions and universities to comply with his agenda. Last week, he said California could lose “large scale” funding “maybe permanently” if the state continued to allow transgender athletes to participate in girls’ and women’s sports.The declaration appeared to be in reference to a transgender track-and-field star from southern California. On Saturday, she won two gold medals and a silver, which she shared with other teen athletes under a new rule by the state’s high school sports body.Trump had also repeatedly threatened to withhold federal disaster aid, assailing the state’s Democratic leaders for their handling of the wildfires that devastated Los Angeles earlier this year.More from House speaker Mike Johnson, who has told CNBC he has been texting with Elon Musk and hopes the dispute is resolved quickly.He said of the “big, beautiful bill”:
      I don’t argue with [Musk] about how to build rockets and I wish he wouldn’t argue with me about how to craft legislation and pass it.
      Johnson earlier issued a warning: “Do not second-guess and don’t ever challenge the president of the United States, Donald Trump.”He had also projected confidence that the Trump-Musk dispute won’t affect prospects for the tax and border bill. “Members are not shaken at all,” he said. “We’re going to pass this legislation on our deadline.” More

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      Judge blocks Trump’s ban on Harvard’s foreign students from entering the US

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      A district judge in Boston has blocked the Trump administration’s ban on Harvard’s international students from entering the United States after the Ivy League university argued the move was illegal.Harvard had asked the judge, Allison Burrough, to block the ban, pending further litigation, arguing Trump had violated federal law by failing to back up his claims that the students posed a threat to national security.“The Proclamation denies thousands of Harvard’s students the right to come to this country to pursue their education and follow their dreams, and it denies Harvard the right to teach them. Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard,” the school said in a filing to the judge.The filing also argued that the national security argument was flawed as the ban did not stop the same people from entering the country, it only barred them from entering to attend Harvard.Harvard amended its earlier lawsuit, which it had filed amid a broader dispute with the Republican president, to challenge the ban, which Trump issued on Wednesday in a proclamation.White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson earlier called Harvard “a hotbed of anti-American, antisemitic, pro-terrorist agitators”, claims that the school has previously denied.“Harvard’s behavior has jeopardized the integrity of the entire US student and exchange visitor visa system and risks compromising national security. Now it must face the consequences of its actions,” Jackson said in a statement.The suspension was intended to be initially for six months but can be extended. Trump’s proclamation also directs the state department to consider revoking academic or exchange visas of any current Harvard students who meet his proclamation’s criteria.The Trump administration has launched a multifront attack on the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university, freezing billions of dollars in grants and other funding and proposing to end its tax-exempt status, prompting a series of legal challenges.Harvard argues the administration is retaliating against it for refusing to accede to demands to control the school’s governance, curriculum and the ideology of its faculty and students.Trump’s directive came a week after Burroughs announced she would issue a broad injunction blocking the administration from revoking Harvard’s ability to enrol international students, who make up about a quarter of its student body.Harvard said in Thursday’s court filing that the proclamation was “a patent effort to do an end-run around this Court’s order”.The university sued after the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, announced on 22 May that her department was immediately revoking Harvard’s student and exchange visitor program certification, which allows it to enrol foreign students.Noem’s action was temporarily blocked almost immediately by Burroughs. On the eve of a hearing before her last week, the department changed course and said it would instead challenge Harvard’s certification through a lengthier administrative process.Wednesday’s two-page directive from Trump said Harvard had “demonstrated a history of concerning foreign ties and radicalism” and had “extensive entanglements with foreign adversaries”, including China.It said Harvard had seen a “drastic rise in crime in recent years while failing to discipline at least some categories of conduct violations on campus”, and had failed to provide sufficient information to the homeland security department about foreign students’ “known illegal or dangerous activities”.The school in Thursday’s court filing said those claims were unsubstantiated. More

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      Trump signs proclamation to restrict foreign student visas at Harvard

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      Donald Trump signed a proclamation to restrict foreign student visas at Harvard University, the White House said on Wednesday.The order would suspend for an initial six months the entry into the US of foreign nationals seeking to study or participate in exchange programs at Harvard. Trump declared that it would jeopardize national security to allow Harvard to continue hosting foreign students.The proclamation is the US president’s latest attempt to choke the Ivy League school from an international pipeline that accounts for a quarter of the student body, and a further escalation in the White House’s fight with the institution.“I have determined that the entry of the class of foreign nationals described above is detrimental to the interests of the United States because, in my judgment, Harvard’s conduct has rendered it an unsuitable destination for foreign students and researchers,” Trump wrote in the order.Trump’s proclamation also directs the US state department to consider revoking academic or exchange visas of any current Harvard students who meet his proclamation’s criteria.Harvard in a statement called Trump’s proclamation “yet another illegal retaliatory step taken by the Administration in violation of Harvard’s First Amendment rights.”“Harvard will continue to protect its international students.”Trump singled out Harvard’s connections with China as reason for cutting off the university from foreign students. The proclamation said Harvard was linked to research that “could advance China’s military modernisation”.The statement also said Harvard was considered the top “party school” for Chinese Communist party bureaucrats and noted that the daughter of Xi Jinping, China’s leader, attended in the early 2010s.In the early 2000s, Harvard ran a “China Leaders in Development” programme in conjunction with Tsinghua University in Beijing for Chinese government officials.“I don’t think this is going to benefit US universities at all,” said a Chinese undergraduate student with an offer to study at Harvard on a master’s degree starting next term who asked that his name be withheld. “It’s causing normal people, us students, a lot of anxiety.”The Trump administration has been engaged in a tense standoff with Harvard, the US’s oldest and wealthiest university, freezing billions of dollars in grants and other funding and proposing to end its tax-exempt status, prompting a series of legal challenges.Harvard argues the administration is retaliating against it for refusing to accede to its demands to control the school’s governance, curriculum and the ideology of its faculty and students.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarvard sued after the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, on 22 May announced her department was immediately revoking Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification, which allows it to enrol foreign students.Her action was almost immediately temporarily blocked by a Boston court. On the eve of a hearing before her last week, the department changed course and said it would instead challenge Harvard’s certification through a lengthier administrative process.Trump’s order on Wednesday invokes a different legal authority than the earlier move by the Department of Homeland Security. The legal justification for the ban, Trump said, are sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act, “which authorize the President to suspend entry of any class of aliens whose entry would be detrimental to the interests of the United States”.Trump officials have repeatedly raised the stakes and sought new fronts to pressure Harvard, cutting more than $2.6bn in research grants and moving to end all federal contracts with the university. The latest threat has targeted Harvard’s roughly 7,000 international students, who account for half the enrolment at some Harvard graduate schools.“President Trump wants our institutions to have foreign students, but believes that the foreign students should be people that can love our country,” the White House said in a fact sheet about the proclamation.Wednesday’s two-page directive said Harvard had “demonstrated a history of concerning foreign ties and radicalism” and had “extensive entanglements with foreign adversaries” including China.As well as the spat with Harvard, the White House has pledged to “aggressively revoke” visas for Chinese students across the country, especially those with links to the CCP or in “critical fields”. More