The fight between the current U.S. government and Harvard has moved back into the courtroom.
The administration of Donald Trump has filed suit against Harvard University, accusing the school of withholding admissions records that federal investigators say are essential to determining whether the university abandoned affirmative action after it was struck down.
In a complaint lodged Friday in federal court in Massachusetts, the Justice Department said Harvard has “thwarted” its inquiry into possible discriminatory practices. The government contends the university has failed to cooperate with a civil rights investigation and is asking a judge to compel the release of the requested documents.
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Harmeet Dhillon, head of the department’s Civil Rights Division, tagged the university’s resistance as suspect. “If Harvard has stopped discriminating, it should happily share the data necessary to prove it,” Dhillon said in a statement.
Harvard, in its own statement, said it has been answering the government’s inquiries and remains aligned with the Supreme Court’s ruling that ended race-conscious admissions.
“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 university said.
The new case marks another chapter in Trump’s protracted clash with Harvard. The administration has already imposed or threatened billions of dollars in funding cuts and other penalties after the university declined to comply with a list of federal demands issued last year.
Administration officials have justified their scrutiny by pointing to alleged anti-Jewish bias on campus. Harvard leaders counter that the pressure campaign amounts to unconstitutional retaliation for declining to embrace the administration’s ideological agenda. The federal government is currently appealing rulings in two separate lawsuits where judges sided with Harvard.
The compliance review at the center of the latest lawsuit began last April, the same day the White House rolled out a sweeping set of directives aligned with Trump’s policy priorities. Investigators sought five years of admissions data covering undergraduate applicants as well as those to Harvard’s medical and law schools, the AP reported.
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The request was expansive. Federal officials asked for applicants’ academic records, standardized test scores, essays, extracurricular profiles and admissions decisions, along with racial and ethnic data. The deadline for producing the material was April 25, 2025. According to the complaint, Harvard did not turn it over.
Justice Department lawyers say the records are necessary to determine whether race is still being weighed in admissions decisions despite the 2023 ruling from the Supreme Court of the United States, which prohibited affirmative action following challenges brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
Trump administration officials have argued that some institutions continue to sidestep the ruling, maintaining that such practices disadvantage white and Asian American applicants.
Apart from Harvard, the White House is pushing colleges nationwide to produce similar admissions data as part of a broader enforcement effort. The Education Department has signaled plans to require more detailed reporting from universities after Trump signed an executive action suggesting schools were ignoring the Supreme Court’s directive.
Tensions between Trump and Harvard appeared to ease last summer when the president said the two sides were close to an agreement that would restore federal funding. No agreement emerged. This month, Trump reignited the standoff, declaring that any deal would require Harvard to pay $1 billion, twice the amount he had previously floated.
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