DOJ sues Harvard, demands race-related admissions records

(CN) — The Trump administration on Friday escalated its clash with higher education by suing Harvard University, accusing the school of unlawfully withholding race-related admissions records from the government amid an ongoing discrimination investigation.

In a 14-page complaint filed in Boston federal court, the Department of Justice claims the school violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by slow-walking document production related to the probe.

“Harvard University is not complying with a federal investigation,” the department claims in the lawsuit. “It unlawfully has withheld from the United States Department of Justice information necessary to determine whether Harvard, which has a recent history of racial discrimination, is continuing to discriminate in its admissions process.”

Title VI prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin in programs that get federal financial assistance.

The department is demanding that the prestigious Ivy League university turn over documents and data related to so-called “DEI” initiatives and how race and ethnicity factor into the admissions process. But it does not explicitly accuse Harvard of racial discrimination in the complaint.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, this Department of Justice is demanding better from our nation’s educational institutions,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement Friday. “Harvard has failed to disclose the data we need to ensure that its admissions are free of discrimination — we will continue fighting to put merit over DEI across America.”

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement, “if Harvard has stopped discriminating, it should happily share the data necessary to prove it.”

In a comment to Courthouse News, a spokesperson for Harvard denied wrongdoing by the school.

“Harvard has been responding to the government’s inquiries in good faith and continues to be willing to engage with the government according to the process required by law,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “The university will continue to defend itself against these retaliatory actions which have been initiated simply because Harvard refused to surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights in response to unlawful government overreach."

The lawsuit is the latest example of President Donald Trump’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, popularized by past administrations as a way to make up for differences in opportunity across racial and socioeconomic lines. But Trump’s view is that these initiatives have resulted in antiwhite — and in Harvard’s case, anti-Asian — discrimination in educational institutions and beyond.

“Harvard used race as ‘a negative factor’ and a ‘pernicious stereotype’ and maintained an ‘obvious’ ‘numerical commitment’ to ‘[o]utright racial balancing,’” the department claims in the new suit, quoting a 2023 Supreme Court decision that gutted affirmative action in college admissions offices.

Friday’s complaint is also part of a growing list of Trump’s attacks on the Cambridge, Massachusetts, university. Just last week, Trump unleashed a rambling late-night barrage of social media posts against Harvard, which he threatened with a criminal investigation and said he’d demand $1 billion “in damages” from.

He’s previously floated fines ranging from $200 million to $500 million for a myriad of supposed wrongdoing by Harvard, which started with his administration claiming the university didn’t do enough to stop antisemitism on its campus during pro-Palestine protests in 2024.

Trump succeeded in getting fellow Ivy League institution Columbia University to agree to a $200 million for similar claims of antisemitism. As it stands, Harvard has resisted a similar deal.

Harvard has instead filed several of its own lawsuits against the government over the last year in response to direct actions taken against the school.

Last spring, Harvard sued the Trump administration after it suddenly banned international students from enrolling. A federal judge blocked the effort, lambasting the administration for using the school’s more than 7,000 student visa holders as “pawns in the government’s escalating campaign of retaliation.”

In another 2025 suit against the government, Harvard challenged the abrupt termination of more than $2 billion in research grants aimed at treating cancer, infectious diseases and neurological disorders Hlike Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. The government attributed these funding freezes, again, to antisemitism — but a federal judge didn’t buy it.

“A review of the administrative record makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that defendants used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically motivated assault on this country’s premier universities, and did so in a way that runs afoul of the APA, the First Amendment and Title VI,” wrote U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs, a Barack Obama appointee, in a September ruling.

The administration had unsuccessfully sought to make that funding conditional on certain demands, including screening international students for their beliefs and installing administrators aligned with the White House’s political agenda.

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