A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit filed by the Trump administration against Harvard University, which accused the school of failing to protect Jewish students during campus protests over the Gaza war. US District Judge Richard Stearns ruled on Thursday that the government’s case did not show evidence of the alleged civil rights violations.
The lawsuit, brought by the Department of Justice in March, charged that Harvard’s faculty and leadership had turned a blind eye to antisemitism and discrimination against Jews and Israelis, in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in federally funded programs. The judge, however, found that the incidents cited in the filing were “too isolated and episodic” to support a claim of ongoing violations.
The case was one of several legal actions taken by the administration in response to how top universities handled pro-Palestinian demonstrations. The administration has repeatedly argued that schools failed to protect students from anti-Jewish harassment during the protests. Protest organizers have long rejected that premise, saying the administration has deliberately conflated criticism of Israel with antisemitism and used isolated anti-Jewish incidents to justify crackdowns on pro-Palestinian speech.
Trump previously moved to freeze $2.2bn in federal funding to Harvard, a step that a federal judge later ruled unlawful. Harvard, which has an endowment valued at more than $56bn, has taken a more defiant approach than several other elite universities. Columbia, Northwestern, and Cornell each opted to reach multimillion-dollar settlements with the administration to preserve funding amid similar allegations.
Critics have noted that the administration’s emphasis on antisemitism has coincided with immigration enforcement actions against pro-Palestine advocates. In July, Columbia protest leader Mahmoud Khalil, who has been targeted for deportation over his involvement in demonstrations, filed a civil rights lawsuit alleging a “public-private” partnership to silence pro-Palestinian voices. The suit cited the conservative Heritage Foundation’s “Project Esther” report as a blueprint and accused the administration of relying on outside groups, including Canary Mission and Betar, to identify student and faculty targets.
A November 2025 report by the American Association of University Professors accused the administration of weaponizing civil rights law to stifle free speech on campuses. While acknowledging that “reprehensible acts of antisemitism have occurred on campuses” since 2023, the group said its analysis found that most federal civil rights complaints came not from students but from people and organizations with no connection to the schools under investigation. The report warned that the “Palestine exception” to the First Amendment could become a pretext for eroding academic freedom altogether.