Judge Dismisses Trump’s Revenge Suit Against Harvard in Stinging Loss

U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns dismissed the Trump administration's Title VI lawsuit against Harvard University on Thursday, ruling that the alleged incidents of antisemitism were too isolated and episodic to support claims of ongoing noncompliance. The lawsuit, filed in March, accused Harvard of allowing a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students, but the judge noted that most incidents occurred between 2023 and 2024, with only three in March 2025, a year before the complaint. This marks the latest legal setback for President Donald Trump in his conflict with Harvard, following a September ruling that blocked a federal funding freeze.

A federal judge on Thursday dismissed the Trump administration’s Title VI lawsuit against Harvard University. Donald Trump accused https://newrepublic.com/post/208030/donald-trump-harvard-new-lawsuit-gaza Harvard in March of violating civil rights laws by allowing a “hostile educational environment” for Jewish and Israeli students over the course of “several years.” Harvard denied the allegations and moved to dismiss the lawsuit. In a new filing https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mad.297801/gov.uscourts.mad.297801.65.0 1.pdf , U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns found that most of the incidents the Trump administration had cited all took place between 2023 and 2024, and the remaining three took place in March 2025—a full year before the complaint was filed. “Without diminishing any concern arising from these occurrences, the court finds them, singly and collectively, to be too isolated and episodic to support a plausible inference that any institutionalized noncompliance with Title VI persists at Harvard to this day,” Stearns wrote. The lawsuit was “devoid of any factual allegations plausibly establishing that any events that might be construed as evidence of noncompliance occurred after June 30, 2025,” he added. The original lawsuit alleged that students were stopped from entering campus buildings by “antisemitic demonstrators” in 2023 and 2024, and that some Jewish students felt pressured into wearing baseball caps to hide their yarmulkes. The federal government claimed this was evidence that Harvard had violated civil rights laws, and demanded the return of “billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies awarded to a discriminatory institution.” But clearly, the administration has failed to prove in court that the university has done anything wrong. This is the latest blow to the president in his ongoing battle with the Ivy League school. Since the start of his second term, Trump has denounced Harvard as an example of an institution infecting American youth with liberal ideas and has attempted to freeze its federal funding. In June 2025, Trump officials tried to prohibit Harvard from admitting international students before a judge stopped the plan https://newrepublic.com/post/197147/trump-war-harvard-university-international-student-court-block . In September 2025, Harvard won a lawsuit https://newrepublic.com/post/199967/judge-blocks-trump-freeze-harvard-university-funding against the administration after the latter froze billions in federal funds from the school. In that case, a federal judge said https://www.npr.org/2025/09/03/nx-s1-5527314/trump-harvard-court-ruling-funding-boston the administration had “used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.” This lawsuit was the second time the Trump administration has sued Harvard this year. In February, the Justice Department sued the school for allegedly not handing over https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-harvard-university-withholding-race-related-admissions-documents its admissions records.