"Religious Liberties Forum" LOL. Unless you criticize Zionism, in which case we curtail your liberty.
Reminds me of the ministries in 1984.
Hasbara's Tried & True Default When All Else Fails
Trump Administration Sues Harvard Over Accusations of Antisemitism
The administration had spent months investigating the Ivy League school. The two sides had been in talks to negotiate a settlement.
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The government blocked billions of dollars in research funding for the school last year. Credit...Lucy Lu for The New York Times
By
Alan BlinderMark Arsenault and
Michael C. Bender
March 20, 2026
The Trump administration sued Harvard University on Friday over claims that the school was violating the civil rights of Jewish and Israeli people, an escalation of the government’s yearlong clash with the Ivy League university.
The administration has spent months investigating Harvard and trying to force a settlement on the university, the largest target in the White House’s campaign to remake American higher education. But the lawsuit Friday — more than six months
after a judge blocked the administration’s opening push to strip Harvard of federal research funding — represented a new threat to the nation’s wealthiest university.
In its lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Boston, the Trump administration said that Harvard had “turned a blind eye to antisemitism and discrimination against Jews and Israelis.” The administration said Harvard had strictly enforced policies against other forms of bias, but had allowed anti-Israel protesters to violate rules “with impunity” after the war in Gaza in 2023.
“Instead of arresting the students or even timely stopping the occupation in violation of university policy, Harvard fed them,” according to the lawsuit, adding that faculty members ”brought them burritos for dinner” and “gave them candy.”
The administration said Harvard had failed to protect Jewish and Israeli students from severe harassment, including physical assault, stalking and exclusion from campus facilities like libraries and classrooms. Some of the episodes, including one where an Israeli student said he was assaulted during a “die-in” protest, have been contested.
“The United States cannot and will not tolerate these failures and brings this action to compel Harvard to comply with Title VI, and to recover billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies awarded to a discriminatory institution,” the suit added.
The lawsuit asks a court to declare that Harvard is “in material breach” of its responsibilities under Title VI and, therefore, the government does not have to pay Harvard any existing grants. The suit further asks the court to force Harvard to pay back grants it has already received. And it asks for an independent monitor, approved by the government, to oversee the school’s compliance.
A Harvard spokeswoman, Sarah Kennedy-O’Reilly
, said Friday that the university had “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 that its “efforts demonstrate the very opposite of deliberate indifference.”
“We will continue to prioritize this important work,” she added, “and will defend the university against this lawsuit, which represents yet another pretextual and retaliatory action by the administration for refusing to turn over control of Harvard to the federal government.”
In a statement on Friday, the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose department is a major source of research funding, said universities had “a duty to protect civil rights” when they accept money from the government.
“We hold Harvard accountable on the principle that antisemitism has no place in any program funded by the American people,” Mr. Kennedy said.
Read the lawsuit
The Trump administration is accusing the school of violating the civil rights of Jewish and Israeli people, an escalation of the government’s yearlong clash with the Ivy League university.
Read Document 44 pages
The administration has made no secret of its disdain for Harvard. The government blocked billions of dollars in research funding for the school last year, after the university rejected a roster of intrusive demands from the government.
Harvard, like every other major American university, relies on federal money to fuel its research enterprise. The school quickly sued, accusing the government of violating its constitutional and procedural rights. A judge ruled in Harvard’s favor in September, though her scathing ruling still left open the possibility that the government could try to block Harvard’s funding through more conventional measures.
With Friday’s lawsuit, the government appeared to adopt that strategy. In its filing on Friday, the government asked that the court “rescind and award the United States restitution of all grant payments made to Harvard” while the university was in violation of the law.
The district court assigned Friday’s case to Judge Richard G. Stearns, a Harvard Law School alumnus whom President Bill Clinton nominated to the bench in 1993. Judge Allison D. Burroughs presided over last year’s funding case; a Trump administration appeal of her ruling is pending.
Although the Trump administration and Harvard spent much of last year discussing the possibility of a legal settlement, ties between the White House and the university have lately been fraying in public and in private.
In an exchange of letters in December, Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber,
pushed back when the education secretary, Linda McMahon, said the university would pay $500 million, with $200 million of that sent directly to the U.S. government. Dr. Garber balked, writing that Harvard was willing to invest $500 million for work force development.
Mr. Trump, searching for a victory, later retreated from the demand for a cash payment to the government. After
The New York Times reported on Mr. Trump’s shift, he reacted with fury,
publicly declaring that Harvard should pay at least $1 billion “in damages” and threatening a criminal investigation.
“This should be a Criminal, not Civil, event, and Harvard will have to live with the consequences of their wrongdoings,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media in February. “In any event, this case will continue until justice is served.”
The new lawsuit has been ready to file for about two months, according to a senior Trump administration official who was unauthorized to speak publicly about the case. It was filed on Friday after the White House approved it.
Yoav Segev, a former student who sued Harvard after a confrontation during a protest in 2023, said through his lawyer that he hoped the administration’s lawsuit would “finally prompt Harvard to take reasonable action.”
“Yoav is grateful that the federal government has sued Harvard for its blatant discrimination against Jews,” the lawyer, Mark Pinkert, said by email.
According to his lawsuit, Mr. Segev, who is Jewish and a citizen of the United States, Israel and Canada, walked through the “die-in” protest on a Harvard lawn holding a camera phone. He was surrounded by protesters who tried to block his camera with scarves and jostled him, according to video footage.
A federal judge in December
dismissed Mr. Segev’s lawsuit, writing that nothing in the complaint “plausibly supports the notion that his assailants’ conduct was motivated by race-based antisemitism.”
Mr. Segev’s appeal is pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, Mr. Pinkert said. The Trump administration’s lawsuit details the same episode.
Rabbi Jason Rubenstein, director of Harvard Hillel, said in a statement that he hoped the Department of Justice would “zealously protect the rights of Jewish students and of every community here at Harvard.”
But, he added, “it’s important to understand the major steps that Harvard, under President Garber’s leadership, has taken to fundamentally remake itself over the course of the past year.”
Friday’s lawsuit against Harvard marked the second time in less than a month that the administration sued a university over civil rights violations.
In late February, the Justice Department
said the University of California, Los Angeles, had tolerated “grossly antisemitic acts and systematically ignored cries for help from its own terrified Jewish and Israeli employees.”
The Justice Department said that U.C.L.A. had “turned a blind eye” — the same phrase used in Friday’s lawsuit against Harvard.
Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education and a former Obama administration official, said his hunch was that the lawsuit against Harvard was “an exercise in frustration.”
“When bullies pound on the table and don’t get what they want,” he said, “they pound again.”
