OAN Staff Katherine Mosack
1:00 PM – Friday, March 20, 2026
The Trump administration has filed a lawsuit against Harvard University, alleging that the prestigious school violated the civil rights of its Jewish students.
The suit, filed early on Friday in a federal district court in Massachusetts, claims that Harvard failed to protect Jewish and Israeli students from antisemitic hostility and fulfill anti-harassment policies, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The filing claims that Jewish and Israeli students faced harassment in the form of stalking and assault, including being “spat upon,” since the October 7, 2023, attack that Hamas carried out on Israel.
“For several years, Jewish and Israeli students endured a hostile educational environment,” the document read. “They were repeatedly denied access to educational facilities by antisemitic demonstrators. Fearful for their safety, Jewish students wore baseball caps to conceal their yarmulkes or kept out of sight, effectively denying them access to Federally funded educational opportunities.”
“Jewish and Israeli students were subjected to severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive harassment on the ground of their race or national origin,” the Trump administration asserted.
The administration argued that Harvard failed to properly discipline harmful behavior toward its Jewish community, violated its own policies and federal law, and is therefore misusing federal funding.
“Harvard’s response to this: do nothing,” the suit read. “Its faculty and leadership turned a blind eye to antisemitism and discrimination against Jews and Israelis. Students and faculty violated Harvard’s time, place, and manner rules with impunity; rules that Harvard has and would enforce against anyone else.”
Other offenses included the university letting instructors cancel class or excuse students to “join illicit demonstrations,” allowing anti-Israeli demonstrators to occupy school libraries and allowing an anti-Israeli encampment on its campus for 20 days.
“Harvard has been and remains deliberately indifferent to what its own Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias deemed the ‘exclusion of Israeli or Zionist students from social spaces and extracurricular activities,’” the administration declared.
It argued that by seeking and accepting federal grants from the U.S., it “certifies compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” This means that the school should comply with the prohibition of discrimination based on race if it expects to continue receiving massive sums of funding.
“Harvard is currently set to receive more than $2,615,000,000 of taxpayer money under active federal grants from the Department of Health and Human Services alone (to say nothing of other agencies),” the filing explained. “Yet Harvard defied federal law and violated Title VI repeatedly by discriminating against Jewish and Israeli students without remorse. And Harvard remains in violation of its Title VI obligations.”
The administration now seeks to recover federal funding that was doled out to the school while it disregarded federal regulations.
Harvard sued the administration last year after the government froze billions of its federal funding. A federal court judge in Boston ruled in Harvard’s favor, calling the antisemitism argument a “smokescreen” to withhold federal money.
“Antisemitism is a serious problem and no matter the context, it is unacceptable,” the university said in a statement. “Harvard has taken substantive, proactive steps to address the root causes of antisemitism in its community.”
Trump’s administration has cracked down on several elite universities that he believes are discriminatory and overrun with left-wing ideology. Many schools have reached agreements with the White House to restore frozen federal grants.
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