An Ivy League graduate serving as a federal judge rushed to block President Donald Trump’s use of student visas to pressure Harvard University into complying with the nation’s civil rights laws.
The judge’s decision bars government officials from implementing Trump’s Thursday decision to deny Harvard the lucrative F, M, and J visas that it uses to annually welcome almost 7,000 tuition-paying migrants for new 2025 university slots — and subsequent jobs — that would otherwise go to young American strivers and scientists.
The university will “sustain immediate and irreparable injury before there is an opportunity to hear [courtroom testimony] from all parties,” the judge said, according to a Politico report on late Thursday.
U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs issued a temporary restraining order Thursday night instructing the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department to disregard a proclamation Trump issued Wednesday wielding presidential immigration authority to effectively ban foreign nationals from entering the U.S. to study or teach at Harvard.
… The judge’s order came less than four hours after the Ivy League school added claims about Trump’s proclamation to a pending lawsuit over an earlier Trump administration move to revoke a certification Harvard has held for more than 70 years to enroll foreign students.
The foreign students are valuable to Harvard, in part, because many come from national elites in different countries — such as China — and are expected to gradually expand the influence and wealth of Harvard’s globalist-minded graduates and its massive investment fund. “Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard,” Harvard insists.
Burroughs, a graduate of Pennsylvania University, has already ruled against the decision by the Department of Homeland Security to curb Harvard’s access to the lucrative supply of foreign students.
RELATED: Students Walk Out of Harvard Commencement in Support of Encampment Protesters Barred from Graduating
The Harvard lawsuits are part of Harvard’s longstanding massive resistance to federal civil rights laws that bar favoritism or hostility to racial, religious, or national groups, such as American students.
Burroughs has a losing record in her defense of Harvard. In 2019, the Pennsylvania University graduate ruled in support of Harvard’s pro-discrimination entry policies and was overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College decision. The Supreme Court ruled:
The student[s] must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race. Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. And in doing so, they have concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.
Trump is likely to win the legal battle because the Supreme Court has already ruled that the president has enormous constitutional authority over who gets to visit the United States. In 2018, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote:
The text of [federal law at section] §1182(f) states:
“Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.”
By its terms, §1182(f) exudes deference to the President in every clause [emphasis addded]. It entrusts to the President the decisions whether and when to suspend entry (“[w]henever [he] finds that the entry” of aliens “would be detrimental” to the national interest); whose entry to suspend (“all aliens or any class of aliens”); for how long (“for such period as he shall deem necessary”); and on what conditions (“any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate”).
Roughly 27 percent of Harvard students are migrants, so reducing ordinary Americans’ access to prestigious educational qualifications. In 2024, roughly 6,800 migrants were given Harvard spaces sought by hard-working Americans.
Trump’s policy ends Harvard’s use of three types of visas.
More than 400,000 migrants use the M and F visas each year to get white-collar work permits via the quasi-legal Curricular Practical Training and Optional Practical Training programs. Many of the university migrants are hired via ethnic networks that discriminate against Americans. Those programs are also a springboard for migrants seeking to get white-collar H-1B visas, U.S. careers, and U.S. citizenship.
The J visa is often used by university managers who prefer to hire migrant graduates who displace American scientists from jobs at universities’ science laboratories.
“We have people who want to go to Harvard and other schools, they can’t get in because we have foreign students there,” Trump said as he suggested the universities should set a 15 percent cap for foreign students. That goal would open up many opportunities for young Americans by roughly halving the number of foreign students in the United States. For example, 27 percent of the students at Ivy League universities are foreigners, and many of them use the visa programs to get desirable jobs and white-collar careers in American companies.
Some media outlets are describing the visa programs — but usually in sympathy with the migrants instead of the very many displaced Americans. For example, the AP wrote on May 30:
Like many international students, Marko, 29, finds himself glued to the news with a growing sense of alarm. His Optional Practical Training expires in a month, and he has applied for an extension but hasn’t heard back, leaving him in limbo. Lawyers for the tech company where he works in New York City advised him to carry proof of his legal status in his wallet, which he finds “dehumanizing.”
…
He has lived in the U.S. for a decade spanning college and graduate school, but his family and friends back home have encouraged him to leave. His hope is that he gets the OPT extension and can then apply for an H-1B visa and continue his life in the U.S., but he also worries about anti-immigrant sentiment and who will be targeted next.
Globalists oppose Trump’s visa cutoff.
“This is war on Elite Human Capital, [so] there’s no greater priority than stopping these [Trump] people,” complained pro-migration blogger Richard Hanania.
The policy is “clearly represents punitive extortion rather than any seriously thought-through policy to promote national security,” complained Lawrence Summers, a pro-migration advocate and a former president of Harvard. “Yes, Harvard should make a variety of changes, but extortion is the wrong way to bring them about,” he wrote.
Read the full article here