A US federal judge has dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit that claimed Harvard University failed to protect Jewish and Israeli students from harassment in the aftermath of the war in Gaza.
In a ruling on Thursday morning, US district judge Richard Stearns in Boston said the administration’s lawsuit – filed in March – failed to plausibly show an ongoing violation of federal civil rights law on Harvard’s campus.
The administration’s complaint focused largely on a handful of incidents alleged in March 2025, Stearns said, saying these were “too isolated and episodic” to support a claim of ongoing civil rights violations by Harvard.
Thursday’s ruling deals a blow to Donald Trump and his officials, and their ongoing push to force the elite university to bow to its will – not only on the response to antisemitism, but to a range of race-in-admissions, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and other issues.
In its original complaint, the Trump administration painted a dystopian picture of Harvard life in the wake of Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack. Department of Justice (DoJ) lawyers said that Jewish and Israeli students were “harassed, physically assaulted, stalked, and spat upon” while the response of the university administration had been to “do nothing”.
That, the DoJ argued, was a violation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that prohibits discrimination in federally funded programs on grounds of race or national origin.
In a brief, but pointed, four-page ruling, Stearns said he was not “diminishing any concern arising” from campus events in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attacks. But he said that the DoJ’s complaint had misconstrued the remit of Title VI.
In framing the 1964 legislation, the judge ruled, Congress intended not to penalize a “wayward funding recipient but instead to incentivize it to bring itself into compliance with Title VI”. It was in essence forward looking, rather than backward looking, while the examples of alleged discrimination that the Trump administration had provided in its complaint were almost entirely restricted to the 2023-24.
The Trump administration’s later amended complaint was “devoid of any factual allegations” and evidence of noncompliance after it had put Harvard on notice under Title VI in June 2025. As a result, what the judge dismissively described as “the government’s fevered forewarning of potential havoc” failed to meet the purpose of the enforcement action.
“We disagree with the ruling and are assessing next steps,” Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice, said in a statement on Thursday.
