Harvard University presented a legal challenge on Thursday to the efforts of President Donald Trump to block visas for foreign students who plan to attend the Ivy League College.
“Signaling our institution for its registration of international students and their collaboration with other educational institutions worldwide is another illegal step that the administration retaliates against Harvard,” said Harvard president Alan M. Garber, in a letter to the community of the Campus.
Trump issued a proclamation on Wednesday to deny visas to foreign students who planned to enter the United States to study in Harvard, his latest attack against the prominent university.
The measure followed an attempt at the end of last month to limit Harvard’s ability to register foreign students revoking their certification in the student and exchanges visitors program, which was temporarily blocked by a federal judge.
Harvard modified a federal complaint on Thursday and will seek that a court “immediately stop the application of proclamation,” Garber wrote in the letter.
“We hope the Court acts quickly,” he wrote.
Trump’s proclamation would not only affect incoming students. He says that the State Department will review foreign students in Harvard under the visas F, M or J to determine if their visas must be revoked.
Harvard said in his complaint that Wednesday’s proclamation, as well as the previous attempt of the National Security Department to revoke their ability to register foreign students, violates their rights of the first amendment.
“Each is part of a concerted and growing campaign of reprisals by the Government in a clear remuneration for Harvard’s exercise their rights of the first amendment to reject the government’s demands to control governance, the curriculum and the ‘ideology’ of its faculty and students,” the amended complaint says.
“Government’s actions also have no basis on the law,” he says.
Harvard’s amended complaint argues that the Immigration Law quoting Trump’s proclamation allows the president to prohibit “a class of aliens whose entry would be” harmful to the interests of the United States “, and that Trump’s proclamation does not suspend the entrance for a class, only people who wish to attend Harvard.
“Therefore, the president’s actions are not carried out to protect the ‘interests of the United States’, but to pursue a government revenge against Harvard,” he argues.
Trump and his administration have addressed Harvard and said he has not done enough to combat anti-Semitism on the campus during the manifestations against the Israel-Ahamas war.
Harvard in April rejected the demands of the Trump administration that included auditing points of view of the student body. In response, the federal government said it was freezing more than $ 2 billion in federal grants.
Garber wrote in Thursday’s letter that will defend his international students.
Harvard said in the amended complaint that attempts to attack international students damage all their students, because Harvard “prepares them to contribute and lead in our global society.”
“International students and academics make outstanding contributions inside and outside our classrooms and laboratories, fulfilling our mission of excellence of innumerable ways,” Garber wrote. “We will celebrate them, we will support them and defend their interests as we continue to affirm our constitutional rights.”
