DHS move to block international students is ‘unlawful’, says Harvard University
Harvard University has said that the Department of Homeland Security’s move to revoke its ability to enrol international students is “unlawful” retaliatory action that threatens serious harm to the university.
In a statement, the university said: “The government’s action is unlawful. We are fully committed to maintaining its ability to host international students and scholars from more than 140 countries and enrich the university. This retaliatory action threatens serious harm to the Harvard community and our country, and undermines Harvard’s academic and research mission.”
The move comes after Harvard refused to provide information homeland security secretary Kristi Noem had previously demanded about some foreign student visa holders who attend the university, the DHS said.
It marks a significant escalation of the Trump administration’s campaign against the elite Ivy League university, which has emerged as one of Trump’s most prominent institutional targets.
Key events
Man accused of killing 2 staff members of Israeli Embassy in DC charged with murder of foreign officials, other crimes
The man accused of killing two staff members of the Israeli Embassy in DC was charged with murder of foreign officials and other crimes, the AP reports.
The killings occurred shortly after 9pm on Wednesday evening, outside the Capital Jewish Museum, where, according to officials, a gunman approached a group leaving an event hosted by the American Jewish Committee and opened fire at close range.
We’ll have more details as they come in.
President Donald Trump has raised at least $600 million in political donations ahead of the midterm elections, the AP reports. That’s a record-breaking amount for a president who can’t run for office again.
Trump is aggressively fundraising with a goal of reaching $1 billion to support his political agenda and help Republicans keep control of Congress next year, sources told the news agency.
By out-raising Democrats and boosting GOP candidates, the president aims to extend his political influence long after leaving office.
Any leftover funds could help him shape the Republican Party’s future, possibly through 2028 or beyond, as a major political force and party kingmaker.
“It’s leverage,” Marc Short, who served as Trump’s director of legislative affairs during his first term and later as Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, told the AP. “It’s a reflection of the power that he still holds.”
The day so far
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The Trump administration has said it is halting Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students and has ordered existing international students at the university to transfer or lose their legal status. On Thursday, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration notified Harvard about its decision following ongoing correspondence regarding the “legality of a sprawling records request”, according to three people familiar with the matter. The records request comes as part of an investigation by the homeland security department in which federal officials are threatening the university’s international student admissions. Story here.
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A federal judge in California blocked the Trump administration from terminating the legal status of international students at universities across the US, reports the Associated Press. District Judge Jeffrey S White also barred the administration from arresting or detaining foreign-born students based on their immigration status while a legal challenge to earlier terminations proceeds through the courts. In the injunction, White said that the Trump administration has “wreaked havoc” on the lives of the plaintiffs as well as other international students.
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Authorities were investigating a brazen attack that killed two young Israeli embassy staff members outside an event at the Jewish museum in downtown Washington DC, leaving the US capital in shock as world leaders condemned the “horrible” and “antisemitic” shootings. Early on Thursday morning, federal agents in tactical gear descended on a Chicago apartment believed to be the alleged gunman’s home. According to a post on X from the FBI’s Washington field office, agents in Chicago were “conducting court-authorized law enforcement activity” that it said was “in relation to yesterday’s tragic shooting in Washington, DC”. More here.
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Donald Trump showed a screenshot of a Reuters video taken in the Democratic Republic of Congo as part of what he falsely presented on Wednesday as evidence of mass killings of white South Africans, Reuters itself reports. “These are all white farmers that are being buried,” said Trump, holding up a print-out of an article accompanied by the picture during a contentious Oval Office meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. In fact, the video published by Reuters on February 3 and subsequently verified by the new agency’s fact check team, showed humanitarian workers lifting body bags in the Congolese city of Goma. The image was pulled from Reuters footage shot following deadly battles with Rwanda-backed M23 rebels.
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Mahmoud Khalil, the detained Palestinian activist, was allowed to hold his one-month-old son for the first time after a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to keep the father and infant separated by a plexiglass divider, reports the Associated Press. The visit today came ahead of a scheduled immigration hearing for Khalil, a legal permanent resident and Columbia University graduate who has been held in a Louisiana jail since 8 March.
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A Republican push to dismantle clean energy incentives threatens to reverberate across the US by costing more than 830,000 jobs, raising energy bills for US households and threatening to unleash millions more tonnes of the planet-heating pollution that is causing the climate crisis, experts have warned. A major tax bill moving through the Republican-held House of Representatives will, as currently written, demolish key components of climate legislation signed by Joe Biden that has spurred a record torrent of renewable energy and electric vehicle investment in the US. Story by Oliver Milman here.
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A federal judge has blocked Donald Trump’s executive order to shut down the Department of Education and ordered the agency to reinstate employees who were fired in mass layoffs. US district judge Myong Joun in Boston granted a preliminary injunction stopping the Trump administration from carrying out two plans announced in March that sought to work toward Trump’s goal to dismantle the department.
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Republicans in the House of Representatives won passage on Thursday of a major bill to enact Donald Trump’s tax and spending priorities while adding trillions of dollars to the US debt and potentially prevent millions of Americans from accessing federal safety net benefits. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act was approved in the early morning hours along party lines by the slim Republican majority, with 215 votes in favor and 214 against. Its passage ended weeks of negotiations that drew into question the GOP’s ability to find agreement on Trump’s top legislative priority in a chamber they control by just three seats. Story here.
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A new report led by the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, lays out a dark vision of American children’s health and calls for agencies to examine vaccines, ultra-processed foods, environmental chemicals, lack of exercise and “overmedicalization”. Kennedy has made combatting the chronic disease “epidemic” a cornerstone of his vision for the US, even as he has ignored common causes of chronic conditions, such as smoking and alcohol use. More here.
Federal judge blocks Trump administration from revoking international students’ legal status
A federal judge in California blocked the Trump administration from terminating the legal status of international students at universities across the US, reports the Associated Press.
District Judge Jeffrey S White also barred the administration from arresting or detaining foreign-born students based on their immigration status while a legal challenge to earlier terminations proceeds through the courts.
In the injunction, White said that the Trump administration has “wreaked havoc” on the lives of the plaintiffs as well as other international students.
“At each turn in this and similar litigation across the nation, Defendants have abruptly changed course to satisfy courts’ expressed concerns,” the judge said. “It is unclear how this game of whack-a-mole will end unless Defendants are enjoined from skirting their own mandatory regulations.”
Trump’s image of dead ‘white farmers’ came from Reuters footage in Congo, not South Africa
Some more factchecking of yesterday’s chaotic Oval Office meeting in which Donald Trump repeated baseless claims of white “genocide” in South Africa to its president Cyril Ramaphosa – this time from Reuters.
During the meeting, Trump showed Ramaphosa and the media a screenshot of Reuters video taken in the Democratic Republic of Congo as part of what he falsely presented as evidence of mass killings of white South Africans.
“These are all white farmers that are being buried,” said Trump, holding up a print-out of an article accompanied by the picture during the contentious meeting.
In fact, the video published by Reuters on 3 February and subsequently verified by the new agency’s fact check team, showed humanitarian workers lifting body bags in the Congolese city of Goma. The image was pulled from Reuters footage shot following deadly battles with Rwanda-backed M23 rebels.
The blog post showed to Ramaphosa by Trump during the White House meeting was published by American Thinker, a conservative online magazine, about conflict and racial tensions in South Africa and Congo.
The post did not caption the image but identified it as a “YouTube screen grab” with a link to a video news report about Congo on YouTube, which credited Reuters.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Andrea Widburg, managing editor at American Thinker and the author of the post in question, wrote in reply to a Reuters query that Trump had “misidentified the image”.
The footage from which the picture was taken shows a mass burial following an M23 assault on Goma, filmed by Reuters video journalist Djaffar Al Katanty.
“That day, it was extremely difficult for journalists to get in … I had to negotiate directly with M23 and coordinate with the ICRC to be allowed to film,” Al Katanty said. “Only Reuters has video.”
Al Katanty said seeing Trump holding the article with the screengrab of his video came as a shock.
In view of all the world, President Trump used my image, used what I filmed in DRC to try to convince President Ramaphosa that in his country, white people are being killed by Black people.
Maya Yang
As we reported earlier, in her statement revoking Harvard’s ability to enrol international students, homeland security secretary Kristi Noem ordered existing international students at the university to transfer or lose their legal status. Noem said:
The revocation of your Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification means that Harvard is prohibited from having any aliens on F- or J-nonimmigrant status for the 2025-2026 academic school year. This decertification also means that existing aliens on F- or J- nonimmigrant status must transfer to another university in order to maintain their nonimmigrant status.
Leo Gerdén, an international student from Sweden, called the announcement “devastating” in the university newspaper Harvard Crimson.
Every tool available they should use to try and change this. It could be all the legal resources suing the Trump administration, whatever they can use the endowment to, whatever they can use their political network in Congress. This should be, by far, priority number one.
The university currently hosts nearly 6,800 international students, with many being on F-1 or J-1 visas, according to university records. International students make up about 27% of the university’s population.
Judge blocks Trump’s plan to dismantle education department and orders administration to reinstate fired employees
A federal judge blocked has blocked the Trump administration from carrying out his executive order to dismantle the Department of Education and ordered it today to reinstate employees terminated in a mass layoff, Reuters reports.
US district judge Myong Joun in Boston at the behest of a group of Democratic-led states, school districts and teachers’ unions issued an injunction blocking the department from moving forward with a mass termination announced in March of over 1,300 employees, which would cut its staff by half.
“The record abundantly reveals that defendants’ true intention is to effectively dismantle the department without an authorizing statute,” wrote Joun.
Lawyers with the justice department argued that the mass terminations were not an effort to shutter the agency but a lawful effort to eliminate bureaucratic bloat while fulfilling its overall statutory mission more efficiently.
But Joun said the cuts were having the opposite effect, as the “massive reduction in staff has made it effectively impossible for the department to carry out its statutorily mandated functions.” “This court cannot be asked to cover its eyes while the department’s employees are continuously fired and units are transferred out until the department becomes a shell of itself,” the judge wrote.
He ordered the administration to not just reinstate the workers but also to halt implementation of Trump’s 21 March directive to transfer student loans and special needs programs to other federal agencies.
The administration swiftly appealed the decision, which education department spokesperson Madi Biedermann said came from “an unelected judge with a political axe to grind”.
White House spokesperson Harrison Fields called the ruling “misguided.” “The president and his secretary of education have the legal authority to make decisions regarding the agency’s reorganization, and a leftist judge’s ruling cannot change that reality,” Fields said in a statement.
Skye Perryman, whose liberal legal group, Democracy Forward, represented the school districts and unions, said today’s ruling means “disastrous mass firings of career civil servants are blocked while this wildly disruptive and unlawful agency action is litigated”.
Faisal Ali
The State department has rejected allegations that Donald Trump “ambushed” South African president Cyril Ramaphosa on Wednesday when he requested a video be suddenly shown in the Oval Office to support his false claim that a white genocide is occurring in the country. The episode happened as the leaders sat across from each other taking questions from the press and Ramaphosa calmly pushed back against the claim.
Tammy Bruce, the state department spokesperson, said Ramaphosa would have been aware of the Trump administration’s position on the issue, and she “would argue against the idea that there was some kind of ambush”.
Bruce went on to explain that the US had broader concerns about the “trajectory of South Africa”, citing its decision to bring charges of genocide against Israel at the ICJ, “cosying up to Iran, and the general choices that they’ve made”. These issues, she said, create a “picture that is worthwhile having a conversation about in the Oval Office”.
RFK’s health report omits key facts in painting dark vision for US children
Jessica Glenza
A new report led by health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr lays out a dark vision of American children’s health and calls for agencies to examine vaccines, ultra-processed foods, environmental chemicals, lack of exercise and “overmedicalization”.
Kennedy has made combatting the chronic disease “epidemic” a cornerstone of his vision for the US, even as he has ignored common causes of chronic conditions, such as smoking and alcohol use.
The 69-page report is the result of a February executive order by Donald Trump that established a “Make America Healthy Again” (Maha) commission and required it to report on children’s health.
While the report broadly summarizes scientific evidence about nutrition, mental health, chemical exposures and children’s mental health, it ignores the leading causes of death for children – firearms and motor vehicle accidents – and one of the most common chronic conditions: dental cavities.
“We will save lives by addressing this chronic disease epidemic head-on. We’re going to save a lot more money in the long run – and even in the short run,” Kennedy said in a press call on Thursday about the report.
Notably, the report reflects some of Kennedy’s bugbears where science is unsettled, but argues research “demonstrates the need for continued studies”, such as on fluoride in water and electromagnetic radiation.
The report also criticizes the growth in the childhood vaccine schedule. The vaccine schedule is widely accepted in the medical community as safe and effective. Additions are publicly debated in meetings with both career government scientists and outside expert advisers.
It also points to research that the report argues “raise[s] important questions” about medications – such as antidepressants, stimulants, GLP-1 weight-loss drugs and gender-affirming care – which are widely considered safe and even standard care.
The flavor of the report is well-represented in a section on “medicalization”, which describes the potential for “undetected but potentially major long-term repercussions”. The portion describes “established harms” as “the tip of a potentially vast iceberg representing both detectable short term negative effects, and potentially hidden negative effects with long term implications”.
US supreme court blocks religious charter school in split ruling
Marina Dunbar
The US supreme court on Thursday blocked an attempt led by two Catholic dioceses to establish in Oklahoma the nation’s first taxpayer-funded religious charter school in a major case involving religious rights in American education that challenged the constitutional separation of church and state.
The 4-4 ruling left intact a lower court’s decision that blocked the establishment of St Isidore of Seville Catholic virtual school. The lower court found that the proposed school would violate the US constitution’s first amendment limits on government involvement in religion.
The conservative justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from the case, leaving eight justices rather than the full slate of nine to decide the outcome. Barrett is a former professor at Notre Dame Law School, which represents the school’s organizers.
When the supreme court is evenly divided, the lower court’s decision stands. The justices did not provide a rationale for their action in the unsigned ruling. It was not disclosed how each member of the bench voted, though it is likely that the three liberal-leaning justices favored upholding the block and if that was indeed the case it poses the intriguing question of which conservative-leaning justice joined them.
DHS move to block international students is ‘unlawful’, says Harvard University
Harvard University has said that the Department of Homeland Security’s move to revoke its ability to enrol international students is “unlawful” retaliatory action that threatens serious harm to the university.
In a statement, the university said: “The government’s action is unlawful. We are fully committed to maintaining its ability to host international students and scholars from more than 140 countries and enrich the university. This retaliatory action threatens serious harm to the Harvard community and our country, and undermines Harvard’s academic and research mission.”
The move comes after Harvard refused to provide information homeland security secretary Kristi Noem had previously demanded about some foreign student visa holders who attend the university, the DHS said.
It marks a significant escalation of the Trump administration’s campaign against the elite Ivy League university, which has emerged as one of Trump’s most prominent institutional targets.
Existing foreign students at Harvard must transfer or lose their legal status, says DHS
In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed that Kristi Noem has ordered it to terminate Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certification.
The statement repeats the Trump administration’s claim that “Harvard is being held accountable for collaboration with the [Chinese Communist party], fostering violence, antisemitism, and pro-terrorist conduct from students on its campus”.
It goes on to say that as a result Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status.
The statement reads:
Harvard’s leadership has created an unsafe campus environment by permitting anti-American, pro-terrorist agitators to harass and physically assault individuals, including many Jewish students, and otherwise obstruct its once-venerable learning environment. Many of these agitators are foreign students. Harvard’s leadership further facilitated, and engaged in coordinated activity with the [Chinese Communist party], including hosting and training members of a CCP paramilitary group complicit in the Uyghur genocide.
On April 16, 2025, secretary Noem demanded Harvard provide information about the criminality and misconduct of foreign students on its campus. Secretary Noem warned refusal to comply with this lawful order would result in SEVP termination.
This action comes after DHS terminated $2.7m in DHS grants for Harvard last month.
Harvard University brazenly refused to provide the required information requested and ignored a follow-up request from the Department’s Office of General Council. Secretary Noem is following through on her promise to protect students and prohibit terrorist sympathizers from receiving benefits from the US government.
Noem says blocking Harvard’s ability to enroll foreign students should ‘serve as a warning’ to academic institutions
Homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, has said that by halting the university’s ability to enroll international students, the Trump administration “is holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism and coordinating with the Chinese Communist party on its campus”.
In a post on X she continued:
It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition payments to help pad their multibillion-dollar endowments.
Harvard had plenty of opportunity to do the right thing. It refused.
They have lost their Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification as a result of their failure to adhere to the law.
Let this serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions across the country.
David Smith
Leavitt is asked to comment on politicians who fail to condemn last night’s killing of two Israeli embassy staff.
“It’s despicable,” she says, “and frankly we have seen a rise in antisemitic protests, of pro-Hamas protests, of terrorist sympathisers.” She adds:
We saw them on our college campuses and we’ve seen the Democrat party turn a blind eye and in some cases actually embrace such antisemitic illegal behaviour.
That’s why this administration has done more than any administration in history to crack down on antisemitism.
