The Trump administration filed another lawsuit against Harvard on Friday morning, alleging the University is in violation of civil rights law for failing to protect Jewish and Israeli students, and asking the court to rescind billions of dollars’ worth of federal research grants that a judge had previously ordered the government to uphold.
Filed in Massachusetts federal district court, the suit alleges that Harvard ignored hostilities on campus in the years following the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, thus violating anti-harassment rules and its obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Harvard disputed those allegations in a statement on Friday. “Harvard cares deeply about members of our Jewish and Israeli community and remains committed to ensuring they are embraced, respected, and can thrive on our campus,” a University spokesperson said, adding that Harvard has taken “substantive, proactive steps to address the root causes of antisemitism and actively enforces anti-harassment and anti-discrimination rules and policies on campus.”
“Harvard’s efforts demonstrate the very opposite of deliberate indifference,” the statement continues. “We will continue to prioritize this important work 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.”
The lawsuit seeks to recover billions of dollars in government funding that Harvard received while allegedly out of compliance with the law. The school is set to receive $2.6 billion in grants from the Department of Health and Human Services alongside funding from other federal agencies, according to the filing.
The government’s suit also asks the court to appoint an independent outside monitor to oversee Harvard’s compliance with a ruling.
The lawsuit is the latest in a series of actions the Trump administration has used to target Harvard over the past year—and a repeated tactic in the government’s efforts to slash the University’s research funding. Last spring, the government froze more than $2.2 billion in federal research grants over accusations of antisemitism; Harvard quickly sued. In September, Judge Allison Burroughs ordered the government to restore the funds, noting the presence of antisemitism on campus but saying the Trump administration was using antisemitism allegations as a pretext to punish the University for protected speech. The government has appealed that ruling.
The allegations in Friday’s suit echo a letter from the Trump administration’s Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism sent to President Alan M. Garber in June 2025, which accused the University of allowing “anti-Semitism to fester on Harvard’s campus and leading “a once great institution to humiliation, offering remedial math and forcing Jewish students to hide their identities and ancestral stories.”
To cite examples of alleged antisemitism on campus, the new suit draws heavily from an April 2025 report of Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, as well as a May 2024 report from the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance.
Unmentioned in the suit are several actions the Harvard administration has often pointed to as examples of its efforts to address antisemitism—from releasing official University reports on antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias to making significant changes to programs that some have accused of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bias. Harvard has dismissed the faculty directors of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies, suspended a Harvard Chan School of Public Health research partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank, and shuttered the Harvard Divinity School’s Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative, among other moves.
Since the fall of 2025, Harvard has maintained a publicly available list of actions it has taken to combat antisemitism, including issuing new guidance to clarify protest rules on campus, enhancing training and education on antisemitism for students, faculty, and staff, supporting viewpoint diversity initiatives, and introducing new courses on Jewish and Israeli history and antisemitism.
Friday’s lawsuit comes on the heels this week of a report from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, led by Representative Tim Walberg, a Republican from Michigan, alleging widespread antisemitism on U.S. college campuses.
