(NewsNation) — A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration‘s attempt to ban Harvard University from enrolling foreign students, hours after the Ivy League school sued the White House.
U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs issued a temporary restraining order freezing the policy on Friday.
On Friday, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told NewsNation: “The American people elected President Trump, not random local judges with their own liberal agenda, to run the country.”
“These unelected judges have no right to stop the Trump Administration from exercising their rightful control over immigration policy and national security policy,” Jackson added.
DHS order would make foreign students transfer or lose legal status
The temporary block comes a day after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem ordered her agency to terminate Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certification, which would have banned the Ivy League school from enrolling any more foreign students.
Under the Thursday DHS order, currently enrolled foreign students were advised to move schools or lose legal status.
Harvard said the government’s attempted action violated the First Amendment and would have had an “immediate and devastating effect for Harvard and more than 7,000 visa holders,” according to a lawsuit filed Friday in federal court in Boston.
Harvard enrolls nearly 7K students in Massachusetts
Harvard enrolls almost 6,800 foreign students at its campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Most are graduate students and they come from more than 100 countries, the Associated Press reports.
While the White House blames the order on Harvard allowing a “scourge of anti-American, anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist agitators on their campus,” the university maintains the order was punishment for defying the White House’s political demands.
The university’s president, Alan M. Garber, condemned the administration’s actions in a statement released Friday.
“The revocation continues a series of government actions to retaliate 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,” Garber said.
NewsNation’s Kellie Meyer and the Associated Press contributed to this report.