The Ivy League judge who is backing Harvard’s new lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s enforcement of civil rights laws was rebuked in 2023 by the U.S. Supreme Court for siding with Harvard’s policy of racial discrimination.
Just hours after Harvard filed its lawsuit, U.S. District Court Judge Allison Dale Burroughs declared she had the power to restrain the federal government’s freeze on lucrative F-1 work permits and J-1 visas for Harvard’s students and researchers. “It is so ordered,” said the judge, who was nominated to the court in 2014 by President Barack Obama.
The quick ruling will be appealed because many laws and prior judicial decisions give the president vast powers to decide who is allowed to enter the United States.
The policy freeze is intended by President Donald Trump to pressure elite universities to comply with federal civil rights laws.
Trump is likely to win the lawsuit because the court has already ruled against Harvard — and has said 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. 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”).
Also, Burroughs’ 2019 ruling in support of Harvard’s pro-discrimination entry policies 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.
In contrast, Burroughs had ruled in 2019 that Harvard could continue to discriminate by race:
The students who are admitted to Harvard and choose to attend will live and learn surrounded by all sorts of people, with all sorts of experiences, beliefs, and talents. They will have the opportunity to know and understand one another beyond race, as whole individuals with unique histories and experiences. It is this, at Harvard and elsewhere, that will move us, one day, to the point where we see that race is a fact, but not the defining fact and not the fact that tells us what is important. But we are not there yet. Until we are, race-conscious admissions programs that survive strict scrutiny will have an important place in society and help ensure that colleges and universities can offer a diverse atmosphere that fosters learning, improves scholarship, and encourages mutual respect and understanding.
Burroughs is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, which is one of the Ivy League universities.
For years, Harvard and other Ivy League universities have operated by their own globalist rules and preferences, regardless of Americans’ laws and funding. So, Trump’s enforcement of federal civil rights laws on Harvard has come as an enormous shock to the elites who identify as affiliates of the globalist institution.
“This will destroy the university as we know it,” Kirsten Weld, a professor of Latin American history, told the New York Times on May 22. She added:
Harvard is situated in the United States physically, but its students and faculty hail from all over the world. That is fundamental to the work and mission of the institution. You cannot take that away and have an institution left at the end of it.
Weld is the president of the Harvard chapter of the American Association of University Professors.
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