Harvard to ask court to declare Trump’s $2bn funding freeze unlawful – US politics live | US news
Published: 2025-07-21 15:03:58 | Views: 9
Harvard returns to court for key hearing against Trump administration
Harvard University returns to court on Monday in a key hearing against the Trump administration over a freeze on more than $2 billion in federal research funding.
US district judge Allison Burroughs will hear arguments from Harvard and the Department of Justice as the university seeks to have the funding freeze declared unlawful, CNN reports.
The freeze, imposed earlier this year, has halted major research efforts and Harvard argues it’s a politically motivated attempt to pressure the school into adopting federal policies on student conduct, admissions, antisemitism, and diversity.
The university’s lawsuit claims the move violates the First Amendment and the Civil Rights Act.
The Trump administration says the freeze is justified, citing Harvard’s failure to adequately address antisemitism on campus following the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks.
Key events
A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration illegally withheld real-time data showing how it spent billions in congressionally mandated funds. Judge Emmet Sullivan said the data, required by law, is essential for watchdogs and lawmakers to track whether the administration was improperly delaying or blocking spending.
“There is nothing unconstitutional about Congress requiring the Executive Branch to inform the public of how it is apportioning the public’s money,” Judge Sullivan writes. “Defendants are therefore required to stop violating the law!”
A former federal prosecutor told AP that she doesn’t expect the grand jury transcripts from the Jeffrey Epstein case to reveal much new information.
Sarah Krissoff, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, told AP: “It’s not going to be much.” She added that testimony could run to about 60 pages because “the Southern District of New York’s practice is to put as little information as possible into the grand jury”.
Krissoff said: “They basically spoon-feed the indictment to the grand jury. That’s what we’re going to see. I just think it’s not going to be that interesting. … I don’t think it’s going to be anything new.”
Trump directed his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to request the release of the transcripts in an effort to quell the political crisis linekd to the Epstein case that was increasingly engulfing his government last week. On Friday, the US Department of Justice asked a federal court to unseal the transcripts in Jeffrey Epstein’s case.
George Chidi
A plan for Texas to redraw its congressional districts and gain five additional Republican seats barrels through flimsy legal arguments and political norms like a rough-stock rodeo bronco through a broken chute.
But the fiddly process of drawing the maps to Republicans’ advantage for 2026 may require more finesse than cowboy politics can produce.
“It is more than redistricting. It’s really theft,” said Democratic representative Al Green, whose Houston-area congressional district is likely to be one targeted by Republicans in a redrawn map. “It’s the kind of election theft that you use when you realize that you can’t win playing with the hand that you’ve been dealt. So, you decide that you’ll just rearrange the cards so that they favor you.”
The attempted power grab comes at a time when the state legislature is meant to be focused on the floods that killed more than 130 people just two weeks ago.
Democrats need to take bolder and more aggressive actions to oppose the Trump administration, protesters across the US told the Guardian during a day of rallies last week honoring the late congressman John Lewis.
Lewis, a civil rights leader and Democratic congressman from Georgia who died five years ago, called for people to participate in non-violent “good trouble, necessary trouble” to advance their causes.
While some elected Democrats have escalated their tactics against Donald Trump and his administration – delivering multi-hour speeches, risking arrest, and physically interposing themselves as a disruption – protesters said they want to see a more united, organized, and aggressive opposition party.
“There’s a lot more that I would like to see from them,” said Jace Snyder, a weather research technician from Lovejoy, Georgia who attended the protest in Atlanta. Snyder is particularly concerned about the Trump administration’s cuts to federal agencies including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (Noaa).
It's a year since Joe Biden dropped out of presidential race
One year ago today, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris to take his place at the top of their party’s ticket.
The extraordinary decision upended American politics and Democrats are still wrestling with the fallout of Biden’s late exit from the 2024 race for the White House.
As the Guardian’s David Smith wrote:
Some argue that he could have pushed on and won; most believe that he left the race too late and paved the way for Trump’s return to the White House. Younger voters accuse the party establishment of betrayal and beat the drum of generational change.
Trump libel case assigned to Obama-appointed judge in Florida
Donald Trump’s libel lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch has been assigned to Darrin P Gayles, a US district judge for the southern district of Florida.
Trump’s lawsuit on Friday, which also targets Dow Jones and News Corp, was filed in the southern district of Florida federal court in Miami.
Gayles was appointed in February 2014 by Barack Obama.
Under the district court’s procedures, new cases are randomly assigned to a judge sitting in the division where the case arose – or a neighbouring one, even if it relates to a previous case. The New York Times reported on how judges are assigned cases after the selection of Trump-appointed Aileen Cannon to the Mar-a-Lago documents case raised questions in 2023.
Harvard, which has the nation’s largest endowment at $53bn, has moved to self-fund some of its research, but warned it can’t absorb the full cost of the federal cuts.
In court filings, the school said the government “fails to explain how the termination of funding for research to treat cancer, support veterans, and improve national security addresses antisemitism”.
The Trump administration denies the cuts were made in retaliation, saying the grants were under review even before the April demand letter was sent. It argues the government has wide discretion to cancel contracts for policy reasons.
“It is the policy of the United States under the Trump administration not to fund institutions that fail to adequately address antisemitism in their programs,” it said in court documents.
If US district Judge Allison Burroughs decides in the university’s favour, the ruling would reverse a series of funding freezes that later became outright cuts as the Trump administration escalated its fight with the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university.
AP reports that such a ruling, if it stands, would revive Harvard’s sprawling scientific and medical research operation and hundreds of projects that lost federal money.
“This case involves the government’s efforts to use the withholding of federal funding as leverage to gain control of academic decisionmaking at Harvard,” the university said in its complaint.
“All told, the tradeoff put to Harvard and other universities is clear: allow the government to micromanage your academic institution or jeopardize the institution’s ability to pursue medical breakthroughs, scientific discoveries, and innovative solutions.”
Peter Stone
Ever since Donald Trump began his second presidency, he has used an “invented” national energy emergency to help justify expanding oil, gas and coal while slashing green energy – despite years of scientific evidence that burning fossil fuels has contributed significantly to climate change, say scholars and watchdogs.
It’s an agenda that in only its first six months, has put back environmental progress by decades, they say.
Trump’s skewed and unscientific energy priorities have come even as climate-change related weather disasters from huge floods in Texas to giant California fires have increased, and as Trump regulators are clamping down on spending for alternative fuels and weather research.
As the death toll from the Texas floods rose to over 100 on 7 July, Trump signed an executive order that added new treasury department restrictions on tax subsidies for wind and solar projects.
That order came days after Trump signed his One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included provisions to gut big tax credits for green energy contained in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act legislation Congress passed during Joe Biden’s presidency
In another oddly timed move, underscoring the administration’s war on science, its proposed budget for the coming fiscal year would shutter 10 labs that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration runs – specifically ones that conduct key research on ways weather changes are affected by a warming earth.
Michael Sainato
An 82-year-old man in Pennsylvania was secretly deported to Guatemala after visiting an immigration office last month to replace his lost green card, according to his family, who have not heard from him since and were initially told he was dead.
According to Morning Call, which first reported the story, long-time Allentown resident Luis Leon – who was granted political asylum in the US in 1987 after being tortured under the regime of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet – lost his wallet containing the physical card that confirmed his legal residency. So he and wife booked an appointment to get it replaced.
When he arrived at the office on 20 June, however, he was handcuffed by two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers, who led him away from his wife without explanation, she said. She herself was kept in the building for 10 hours until relatives picked her up.
The family said they made efforts to find any information on his whereabouts but learned nothing.
Then, sometime after Leon was detained, a woman purporting to be an immigration lawyer called the family, claiming she could help – but did not disclose how she knew about the case, or where Leon was.
Harvard returns to court for key hearing against Trump administration
Harvard University returns to court on Monday in a key hearing against the Trump administration over a freeze on more than $2 billion in federal research funding.
US district judge Allison Burroughs will hear arguments from Harvard and the Department of Justice as the university seeks to have the funding freeze declared unlawful, CNN reports.
The freeze, imposed earlier this year, has halted major research efforts and Harvard argues it’s a politically motivated attempt to pressure the school into adopting federal policies on student conduct, admissions, antisemitism, and diversity.
The university’s lawsuit claims the move violates the First Amendment and the Civil Rights Act.
The Trump administration says the freeze is justified, citing Harvard’s failure to adequately address antisemitism on campus following the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks.
Donald Trump demanded in a Truth Social post on Sunday that the NFL’s Washington Commanders and MLB’s Cleveland Guardians revert to their old names, both of which were abandoned in recent years due to being racially insensitive to Native Americans.
“The Washington ‘Whatever’s’ [sic] should IMMEDIATELY change their name back,” the post read in part. “There is a big clamoring for this … Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them. Times are different now than they were three or four years ago.”
Hours later, Trump said in a separate post that he would move to block the Commanders’ plans to build a new stadium at the old RFK Stadium site in Washington DC unless they changed their name. It is unclear if Trump would be able to do so. Although the RFK Stadium site was once on federal land, Joe Biden signed a bill earlier this year – one of his final acts in office – transferring control to the DC city government for a 99-year term.
Trump also posted that the call to change names applied to Cleveland’s baseball team, which he called “One of the six original baseball teams, with a storied past.”
President Donald Trump’s administration wants to visit the Federal Reserve this week to review its $2.5 billion renovation, Semafor reported on Monday, citing White House deputy chief of staff James Blair.
Senate banking chair Tim Scott is in talks to attend the visit as well, the report added, citing a person familiar with the plans.
The Kremlin said on Monday that it did not rule out the possibility of a meeting between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump if the Russian and US presidents were both in Beijing at the same time in September.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed that Putin would visit China for events to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two, but said Moscow had not heard if Trump planned to go.
“You know that we are preparing for a trip to Beijing, our president is preparing for this trip... But we have not heard that president Trump is also going there, to Beijing,” Peskov said when asked if the two leaders could meet, including possibly in a three-way format with Chinese president Xi Jinping.
“If it so happens that (Trump) is there, then, of course, we cannot rule out that the question of the expediency of holding a meeting will be raised,” Peskov told reporters.
The Times newspaper reported last week that China was positioning itself to hold a summit between Trump and Putin.
Ice chief says he will continue to allow agents to wear masks
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I’ll be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next couple of hours.
We start with news that the head of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) said on Sunday that he will continue allowing the controversial practice of his officers wearing masks over their faces during their arrest raids.
As Donald Trump has ramped up his unprecedented effort to deport immigrants around the country, Ice officers have become notorious for wearing masks to approach and detain people, often with force. Legal advocates and attorneys general have argued that it poses accountability issues and contributes to a climate of fear.
On Sunday, Todd Lyons, the agency’s acting director, was asked on CBS Face the Nation about imposters exploiting the practice by posing as immigration officers. “That’s one of our biggest concerns. And I’ve said it publicly before, I’m not a proponent of the masks,” Lyons said.
Read the full story here:
Meanwhile, we have a report on how migrants at a Miami immigration jail were shackled with their hands tied behind their backs and made to kneel to eat food from styrofoam plates “like dogs”, according to a report published on Monday into conditions at three overcrowded south Florida facilities.
The incident at the downtown federal detention center is one of a succession of alleged abuses at Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (Ice) operated jails in the state since January, chronicled by advocacy groups Human Rights Watch, Americans for Immigrant Justice, and Sanctuary of the South from interviews with detainees.
Dozens of men had been packed into a holding cell for hours, the report said, and denied lunch until about 7pm. They remained shackled with the food on chairs in front of them.
The full story can be found here:
In other developments:
An 82-year-old man in Pennsylvania was secretly deported to Guatemala after visiting an immigration office last month to replace his lost green card, according to his family, who have not heard from him since and were initially told he was dead. According to Morning Call, which first reported the story, longtime Allentown resident Luis Leon – who was granted political asylum in the US in 1987 after being tortured under the regime of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet – lost his wallet containing the physical card that confirmed his legal residency.
Donald Trump has said that he would move to block the Commanders’ plans to build a new stadium at the old RFK Stadium site in Washington DC unless they changed their name. It is unclear if Trump would be able to do so. The RFK Stadium site was once on federal land but Joe Biden signed a bill earlier this year – one of his final acts in office – transferring control to the DC city government for a 99-year term. Trump also posted that the call to change names applied to Cleveland’s baseball team, which he called “one of the six original baseball teams”.
Scores of scientists conducting vital research across a range of fields from infectious diseases, robotics and education to computer science and the climate crisis have responded to a Guardian online callout to share their experiences about the impact of the Trump administration’s cuts to science funding. Many said they had already had funding slashed or programs terminated, while others feared that cuts were inevitable and were beginning to search for alternative work, either overseas or outside science.
Ever since Donald Trump began his second presidency, he has used an “invented” national energy emergency to help justify expanding oil, gas and coal while slashing green energy – despite years of scientific evidence that burning fossil fuels has contributed significantly to climate change, say scholars and watchdogs. It’s an agenda that in only its first six months has put back environmental progress by decades, they say.
Trump said he would help Afghans detained in the United Arab Emirates for years after fleeing their country when the US pulled out and the Taliban took power.
Polls released on Sunday showed falling support among Americans for Trump’s hardline measures against illegal immigration, as the Republican president celebrated six months back in power. Polls from CNN and CBS show Trump has lost majority support for his deportation approach.
A growing group of African Americans are ditching corporate big-box retail stores that rolled back their DEI programs and instead are shopping at small, minority- and women-owned businesses they believe value their dollars more.
