Trump Admin Sues Harvard for Allegedly Failing to Protect Jewish and Israeli Students from Anti-Semitism

President Donald Trump’s administration filed a lawsuit against Harvard University on Friday, alleging that the Ivy League institution had failed to protect its Jewish and Israeli students from anti-Semitic discrimination and is seeking to cut off billions of dollars in grant funds.

The dispute stems from the protests that rocked Harvard and other college campuses in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. In April 2025, Trump issued a list of demands to Harvard, including calling for it to end its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, ban masks at protests, expel students involved in pro-Palestinian protests, and commit to “full cooperation” with the Department of Homeland Security. Harvard President Alan M. Garber rejected the president’s orders as nothing more than a “political ploy disguised as an effort to address antisemitism on campus.”

In response, Trump threatened to withhold over $2 billion in grants, cancel $60 million in federal contracts, called for the university to lose its tax-exempt status, and called for Harvard to lose its ability to host foreign students.

Since then, the college and the administration have gone back and forth, with Trump issuing executive orders, several lawsuits being filed by Harvard against such orders, court rulings and appeals, and recently, repeated reports about a possible deal. But now it seems those negotiation discussions have apparently been for naught.

The 44-page complaint was filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts and accuses Harvard of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, a federal law that prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in any programs or activity that receives federal funding, by creating an allegedly “hostile educational environment” for Israeli and Jewish students and being “deliberately indifferent” to these students being targeted for “hostility, harassment, intimidation, and exclusion” on campus.

In the lawsuit, the government cites incidents that occurred during or connected to the protests, including “demonstrations [that] occurred in classrooms and libraries” where students could not easily avoid or retreat from; language from the protesters that was “calling for their deaths, or the deaths of people with shared racial/ethnic and national origin backgrounds;” and students who were “spit on in the face for wearing a yarmulke, stalked on campus, and jeered by peers with calls of ‘Heil Hitler.'”

A Harvard spokesperson issued a statement to CNN saying that the university “has taken substantive, proactive steps to address the root causes of antisemitism and actively enforces anti-harassment and anti-discrimination rules and policies on campus,” and accusing the lawsuit of “represent[ing] yet another pretextual and retaliatory action by the administration for refusing to turn over control of Harvard to the federal government.”

White House spokesperson Liz Huston provided a statement on behalf of the administration, saying, “Harvard University has failed to protect its Jewish students from harassment and has allowed discrimination to wreak havoc on its campus.”

CNN senior reporter Betsy Klein reported on the latest developments on Friday afternoon’s episode of CNN News Central, noting that the lawsuit was asking the court “to declare that Harvard is in violation of its contract with the federal government,” which “means that they would not be able to get more than $2.6 billion in future grants,” as well as seeking to rescind grants that have already been awarded to Harvard and seeking an “independent outside monitor.”

“That is something that Harvard has resisted so far,” Klein added, noting that “Harvard is the only school that has really aggressively taken on the Trump administration in court, and they are pushing back on this very aggressively,” with the previous lawsuits that were currently awaiting appeal and the statement from the university spokesperson.

Read the complaint here.

Watch the clip above via CNN.

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!