The university is hoping for a broad court order that would keep the White House from using workarounds to prevent foreign enrollment.
Lawyers for Harvard University head back to a Boston courtroom on Monday, where they will urge a federal judge to block the Trump administration’s tactics to keep international students from attending.
The hearing follows at least four different attempts by Trump administration officials to end or limit Harvard’s foreign enrollment. If they succeed, it could affect about 7,000 international scholars and potentially deliver a disabling blow to the campus’s finances, curriculum and identity.
In a court filing, the university said that Harvard students have been denied visas, detained at Boston’s Logan airport and even sent home in apparent contravention of a judge’s order.
Accusing the administration of a politically motivated crusade, Alan M. Garber, Harvard’s president, has characterized the government actions as retaliation “against Harvard for our refusal to surrender our academic independence and to submit to the federal government’s illegal assertion of control over our curriculum, our faculty and our student body.”
Harvard sued the administration last month to block its efforts to bar foreign students. A federal judge in Boston, Allison D. Burroughs, then temporarily halted the federal government’s actions.
But the situation has led to confusion among students, and many have expressed anxiety over their status, according to Harvard officials. They include some international students who are already enrolled and others headed to the school in Cambridge, Mass., for the first time this summer and fall.
