DHS Benchslapped With Immediate TRO In Harvard Student Visas Case
Kristi Noem is just as good at First Amendment as she is at habeas corpus. The post DHS Benchslapped With Immediate TRO In Harvard Student Visas Case appeared first on Above the Law.
Some presidents walk softly and carry a big stick. Some presidents bigfoot around, shouting “WE’RE ABOUT TO DO SOME CRAZY ILLEGAL SHIT!” and telegraphing every punch. Those presidents get injunctions in record time.
Yesterday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that Harvard University would be barred from admitting students under the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP). This would have the effect of revoking the visas for more than a quarter of the student body, including those already enrolled for summer school and the 2025-2026 academic year.
The move was not unanticipated. Trump has been shouting about revoking Harvard’s tax exempt status for months, and rasslin’ impresario Linda McMahon, who is somehow Secretary of Education, has been making weird noises about the university not “vetting professors that they’re hiring to make sure that they’re not teaching ideologies.” Whatever the hell that means.
Noem and her goons have been stomping around demanding not just visa records, which they’re entitled to under the SEVP’s records keeping requirement, but also “information regarding misconduct and other offenses that would render foreign students inadmissible or removable.” First she said that failure to comply would constitute a “voluntary withdrawal” from the program. Then, when Harvard did comply, she demanded even more information about disciplinary records of foreign students.
Harvard’s lawyers are no dummies — the university’s counsel includes attorney’s from Lehotsky Keller Cohn, Jenner & Block, Quinn Emanuel, and King & Spalding. They took care to build a voluminous record of compliance, knowing well what was coming.
And yesterday, it came, in a letter from Noem announcing the university’s decertification:
As a result of your refusal to comply with multiple requests to provide the Department of Homeland Security pertinent information while perpetuating an unsafe campus environment that is hostile to Jewish students, promotes pro-Hamas sympathies, and employs racist “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies, you have lost this privilege.
Noem then headed to Fox News to ensure that everyone would know this was pure retaliation for disfavored speech, not because the school violated SEVP standards.
Within hours, Harvard filed a 72-page complaint with 28 exhibits alleging First Amendment retaliation and viewpoint discrimination, along with due process and statutory violations. They designated the case as related to the pending suit over the administration arbitrarily yanking funds from the school to punish it for amorphous thought crimes, and, having successfully gotten themselves a berth on Judge Allison Burroughs’s docket, filed an emergency motion for a temporary restraining order.
“Revoking Harvard’s certification is unlawful many times over,” they wrote, noting that there is a process for revoking SEVP certification, and it involves more than just yelling about antisemitism and “illegal” DEI.
“The thousands of international students who were scheduled to arrive on campus for the upcoming summer and fall terms will no longer be able to enter the country,” they argued, adding, “The effects on Harvard’s students—all of its students—will be devastating. Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard.”
And Judge Burroughs agreed. Before lunch, she issued a TRO barring the government from “Implementing, instituting, maintaining, or giving effect to the revocation of Plaintiff’s SEVP certification” or “Giving any force or effect to the Department of Homeland Security’s May 22, 2025 Revocation Notice.”
Kristi Noem barely got a full news cycle out of the thing. And thanks to her constant shouting that she’s cutting grants and revoking the “privilege” of SEVP to punish the school for exceeding the WOKE limit, she’s not going to win another cycle any time soon.
A hearing is scheduled for Wednesday at 10:30am. Let’s see which DOJ lawyer gets to show up and argue that it’s totally fine to cancel summer school because Harvard is teaching anti-American ideologies.
President and Fellows of Harvard College v. United States Department of Homeland Security [Docket via Court Listener]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.
The post DHS Benchslapped With Immediate TRO In Harvard Student Visas Case appeared first on Above the Law.
