US judge dismisses Trump administration lawsuit against Harvard over Jewish student protections

A federal judge in the US has dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Trump administration accusing Harvard University of failing to adequately protect Jewish students. The case was part of a series of legal actions taken by the Trump administration in response to how leading universities handled pro-Palestinian protests during Israel's military campaign in Gaza.

The Trump administration repeatedly asserted that university leaders failed to adequately shield students from antisemitic behavior during the protests. However, protest organizers rejected this view, arguing that the administration deliberately conflated criticism of Israel with antisemitism and exploited isolated antisemitic incidents to justify crackdowns on pro-Palestinian activism.

The lawsuit, filed by the US Department of Justice in March, alleged that "Harvard's faculty and leadership have turned a blind eye to antisemitism and discrimination against Jews and Israelis." The complaint argued that Harvard's actions violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, and national origin in federally funded programs.

But Judge Richard Stearns said on Thursday (local time) that the Trump administration's lawsuit failed to provide evidence of the alleged violations. Stearns noted that the incidents cited in the complaint were "too isolated and sporadic" to prove a pattern of ongoing civil rights violations.

Earlier, Trump had moved to freeze $2.2 billion in federal funding for Harvard. University lawyers called this an effort to leverage research money as a bargaining chip to force the institution to allow the administration to "micromanage" its operations. Last year, a federal judge ruled that the funding freeze was illegal.

Harvard, with an endowment exceeding $56 billion, has been a rare hardline opponent of the Trump administration. Meanwhile, other institutions such as Columbia, Northwestern, and Cornell have opted to reach multi-million-dollar settlement agreements with the Trump administration to retain funding, following a series of allegations related to their handling of pro-Palestinian protests as well as hiring and admissions policies.

Many critics argue that the administration's emphasis on combating antisemitism comes amid its use of immigration enforcement measures to suppress pro-Palestinian supporters. In July last year, Mahmoud Khalil—a Columbia University protest leader targeted for deportation over his participation in demonstrations—filed a civil rights lawsuit alleging a "public-private" partnership aimed at silencing pro-Palestinian voices.

Khalil's lawsuit cited the conservative Heritage Foundation's "Project Esther" report, which is said to outline a plan similar to the Trump administration's approach. The complaint also accused the Trump administration of relying on outside groups such as Canary Mission and Betar to identify students and faculty for targeting.

A report published in November last year by the American Association of University Professors accused the Trump administration of weaponizing civil rights law to stifle free speech on college campuses. The report acknowledged that "reprehensible antisemitic acts have occurred on campuses" since 2023, but its analysis showed that the majority of federal civil rights complaints did not come from students, but from "individuals and organizations with no connection to the universities under investigation."

"A long-standing Palestine exception in the First Amendment now risks giving way to a new reality," the report warned. "Palestine is no longer an exception to academic freedom but has become a pretext for abolishing this norm entirely, within a tyrannical assault on the autonomy of higher education and the very idea of racial and gender equality."