A US judge will temporarily halt the Trump administration’s efforts to block Harvard University from enrolling and hosting foreign students, Judge Allison Burroughs said at a hearing in Boston on Thursday.
The eventual order “gives some protection to international students” as Harvard and the administration prepare to make their cases, she said.
Harvard Holds Graduation In The Shadow Of Trump’s Threat
Harvard held its annual graduation ceremony on Thursday as a federal judge considers the legality of punitive measures taken against the university by US President Donald Trump.
Hundreds of robed students and academics squeezed onto the steps of the campus’s main library as Trump piles unprecedented pressure onto the university, one of the most prestigious in the world.
The president is seeking to ban Harvard from having foreign students, shredding its federal contracts, slashing its multibillion-dollar grants, and challenging its tax-free status.
The Ivy League institution has continually drawn Trump’s ire while publicly rejecting his administration’s repeated demands to give up control of recruitment, curricula, and research choices.
The government claims Harvard tolerates anti-Semitism and liberal bias.
“Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect, and all they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper,” Trump said Wednesday.
Harvard president Alan Garber got a huge cheer Thursday when he mentioned international students attending the graduation with their families, saying it was “as it should be” — but Garber did not mention the Trump fight directly.
Garber has acknowledged that Harvard does have issues with anti-Semitism and that it has struggled to ensure that a variety of views can be safely heard on campus.
Ahead of the ceremony, members of the Harvard band sporting distinctive crimson blazers and brandishing their instruments filed through the narrow streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts — home to the elite school, America’s oldest university.
In front of a huge stage, hundreds of chairs were laid out in a grassy precinct that was closed off to the public as the event got underway.
Students wearing black academic gowns toured through Cambridge with family members taking photographs.
Madeleine Riskin-Kutz, a Franco-American classics and linguistics student at Harvard, said some students were planning individual acts of protest against the Trump policies.
“The atmosphere (is) that just continuing on joyfully with the processions and the fanfare is in itself an act of resistance,” the 22-year-old said.
Court Battles
Garber has led the legal fightback in US academia after Trump targeted several prestigious universities — including Columbia, which made sweeping concessions to the administration in an effort to restore $400 million of withdrawn federal grants.
A federal judge in Boston will on Thursday hear arguments over Trump’s effort to exclude Harvard from the main system for sponsoring and hosting foreign students.
Judge Allison Burroughs has temporarily paused the policy, which would have ended Harvard’s ability to bring students from abroad who currently make up 27 percent of its student body.
Harvard has since been flooded with inquiries from foreign students seeking to transfer to other institutions, Maureen Martin, director of immigration services, said Wednesday.
“Many international students and scholars are reporting significant emotional distress that is affecting their mental health and making it difficult to focus on their studies,” Martin wrote in a court filing.
Retired immigration judge Patricia Sheppard protested outside Harvard Yard on Wednesday, sporting a black judicial robe and brandishing a sign reading “for the rule of law.”
Basketball star and human rights campaigner Kareem Abdul-Jabbar addressed the class of 2025 for Class Day on Wednesday.
“When a tyrannical administration tried to bully and threaten Harvard to give up their academic freedom and destroy free speech, Dr. Alan Garber rejected the illegal and immoral pressures,” he said, comparing Garber to civil rights icon Rosa Parks.
White House Unhappy Over Blocking Tariffs
The White House on Thursday blasted a federal court’s decision to block many of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs, marking a major setback to his trade strategy.
Since returning to the presidency in January, Trump has moved to redraw his country’s trade ties with the world while using tariffs as a negotiating tactic to pressure foreign governments to the table.
But the stop-start rollout of levies, impacting both friend and foe, has roiled markets and snarled supply chains.
The three-judge Court of International Trade ruled Wednesday that Trump had overstepped his authority and barred most of the duties announced since he took office.
The White House called this ruling “blatantly wrong” on social media, expressing confidence that the decision would be overturned on appeal.
Attorneys for the Trump administration have filed an appeal against the ruling, which gave the White House 10 days to complete the process of halting affected tariffs.
Nothing’s Really Changed
Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro told Bloomberg Television: “Nothing’s really changed.”
“If anybody thinks this caught the administration by surprise, think again,” he added.
Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, told Fox Business that although officials have other options that would “take a couple of months” to implement, they are not planning to pursue these right now.
He insisted that “hiccups” because of decisions by “activist judges” would not affect negotiations with other trading partners, adding that three deals are close to finalization.
Trump’s global trade war has roiled markets with import levies aimed at punishing economies that sell more to the United States than they buy.
He argued that resulting trade deficits and the threat posed by drug smuggling constituted a “national emergency” that justified the widespread tariffs — which the court ruled against.
White House spokesman Kush Desai earlier said: “It is not for unelected judges to decide how to properly address a national emergency.”
China: ‘Cancel Wrongful Tariffs’
Trump has been using tariffs as leverage in trade negotiations, including with the European Union and China.
Beijing — which was hit by an additional 145 percent tariffs before they were temporarily reduced to give space for negotiations — reacted by saying Washington should scrap the levies.
“China urges the United States to heed the rational voices from the international community and domestic stakeholders and fully cancel the wrongful unilateral tariff measures,” said commerce ministry spokeswoman He Yongqian.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said his government welcomed the court decision, but warned that trade ties remain “profoundly and adversely threatened” by the remaining sector-specific levies and further threats.
Japan’s tariffs envoy Ryosei Akazawa said Tokyo would study the ruling, as he left for a fourth round of talks in Washington.
Trump unveiled sweeping import duties on nearly all trading partners in April, at a baseline 10 percent — plus steeper levies on dozens of economies, including China and the EU, which have since been paused.
The US court’s ruling also quashes duties that Trump imposed on Canada, Mexico, and China separately using emergency powers.
But it leaves intact 25 percent duties on imported autos, steel, and aluminum.
Asian markets rallied Thursday, but US indexes were mixed around midday. Europe closed slightly down as the realization sank in that the decision might not be a definitive moment.
Extraordinary Threat
The federal trade court was ruling in two separate cases — brought by businesses and a coalition of state governments — arguing that the president had violated Congress’s power of the purse.
The judges said the cases rested on whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA) delegates such powers to the president “in the form of authority to impose unlimited tariffs on goods from nearly every country in the world.”
“The court does not read IEEPA to confer such unbounded authority and sets aside the challenged tariffs imposed thereunder,” they said.
The judges stated that any interpretation of the IEEPA that “delegates unlimited tariff authority is unconstitutional.”
Analysts at London-based research group Capital Economics said the case may end up with the Supreme Court, but would be unlikely to mark the end of the tariff war.
Trump could explore other sections of US law or seek congressional approval for tariffs.
Via: Agence France-Presse
