Harvard sues Trump administration as it fights back against threats to slash federal funding – as it happened (2025)

We’re wrapping things up now – thanks for following along. Here’s what happened today:

• Donald Trump offered public support for defense secretary Pete Hegseth after it emerged that Hegseth had shared information about US strikes in Yemen last month in a second Signal group chat that included family, his personal lawyer and several top Pentagon aides.

• A former top Pentagon spokesperson, John Ullyot, condemned Hegseth and said it had been a “month of total chaos” in an opinion essay that said the defense secretary would be unlikely to remain in his role.

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• Republican congressman Don Bacon suggested he would not keep Hegseth in place were he was the president. Bacon, who sits on the House armed services committee, did not explicitly call for Hegseth’s resignation but said he had “concerns from the get-go because Pete Hegseth didn’t have a lot of experience”.

• The White House denied an NPR report that it had begun the process of looking for a new secretary of defense. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the report was “total FAKE NEWS”.

• The Trump administration is planning to pull an additional $1bn of funding for Harvard University amid an escalating fight with the university, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

• Harvard University sued the Trump administration alleging the Trump administration is trying to “gain control of academic decision-making at Harvard” and violating the first amendment.

• Four House Democrats have travelled to El Salvador to call attention to the flight of Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man wrongly deported to El Salvador. Congress members Maxwell Frost of Florida, Robert Garcia of California, Yassamin Ansari of Arizona and Maxine Dexter of Oregon are in El Salvador to facilitate Garcia’s return to the United States.

• Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate and Palestinian organizer who is being held at a Louisiana detention facility because of his activism, is now a father.

• US stock markets started falling again on Monday morning as Donald Trump continued attacks against the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, who the president called “a major loser” for not lowering interest rates.

• The US supreme court is hearing arguments today in a case that could threaten Americans’ access to free preventive healthcare services under the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare.

• Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem’s purse, containing her driver’s license, apartment keys, passport, DHS access badge, blank checks and about $3,000 in cash, was stolen while she was dining at a restaurant in Washington DC on Sunday night.

Paul Atkins has been sworn in as SEC chairman.

Atkins, who most recently served as chief executive of financial services consultancy Patomak Global, was an SEC commissioner under President George W. Bush.

“I am honored by the trust and confidence President Trump and the Senate have placed in me to lead the SEC,” said Atkins in a statement. “As I return to the SEC, I am pleased to join with my fellow Commissioners and the agency’s dedicated professionals to advance its mission to facilitate capital formation; maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets; and protect investors. Together we will work to ensure that the U.S. is the best and most secure place in the world to invest and do business.”

Noor Abdalla has fought for the release of her husband even in the waning days of her pregnancy. A statement published on 8 April she wrote:

“They are trying to silence you. They are trying to silence anyone who dares to speak out against the atrocities happening in Palestine. But they will fail. We will not be silenced. We will persist, with even greater resolve, and we will pass that strength on to our children and our children’s children – until Palestine is free.”

Now, in her first days of motherhood, Abdalla has vowed to continue to fight for Khalil’s release. “I know when Mahmoud is freed, he will show our son how to be brave, thoughtful, and compassionate, just like his dad.”

Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate and Palestinian organizer who is being held at a Louisiana detention facility because of his activism, is now a father.

Noor Abdalla, his wife, released a statement on Monday evening:

“I welcomed our son into the world earlier today without Mahmoud by my side. Despite our request for ICE to allow Mahmoud to attend the birth, they denied his temporary release to meet our son. This was a purposeful decision by ICE to make me, Mahmoud, and our son suffer.”

Earlier this month, an immigration judge ruled that Khalil is eligible to be deported from the United States. Khalil was arrested on 8 March on grounds that he is considered to be a threat to US foreign policy.

The Department of Education announced it will restart federal student loan payments next month for millions of borrowers and will eventually begin garnishing people’s wages.

According to AP, the government will start collection through the treasury department’s offset program on 5 May. The offset program withholds government payments including tax refunds, federal wages and other benefits from people who owe money to the government. The government will also begin to garnish the wages of borrowers who are in default after a 30-day notice.

Senate Republicans are throwing their support behind defense secretary Pete Hegseth.

“These nameless leakers from the Pentagon want a military that’s woke, not lethal,” a new post on X from the Senate Republicans account read. “That’s why they’re trying to smear Pete Hegseth. Senate Republicans stand behind @POTUS and Secretary Hegseth.”

Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man wrongly deported to El Salvador, is “in good conditions and in an excellent state of health”, according to a state department attestation submitted to a federal court overseeing García’s case.

The declaration is part of the daily updates US district judge Paula Xinis has ordered the federal government to provide on whether and how it is complying with her order to bring García back to the US.

The declaration read: “On April 20 and 21, our Ambassador requested an update from the Salvadoran government regarding the physical location and custodial status of Mr Abrego García. The Salvadoran government responded on April 21 that Mr Abrego García is being held at the Centro Industrial penitentiary facility in Santa Ana, ‘in good conditions and in an excellent state of health.’”

Trump said that the US can’t give everyone they are trying to deport a trial. In a post on Truth Social, Trump said giving everyone a trial would “take, without exaggeration, 200 years. We would need hundreds of thousands of trials for the hundreds of thousands of Illegals we are sending out of the Country.”

“Such a thing is not possible to do,” he said in his post, lamenting that courts making it harder to deport undocumented immigrants.

In its lawsuit, Harvard alleges the government is violating the first amendment as well as several federal laws and regulations. And that cutting off federal funding to these research efforts would have “severe and long-lasting” consequences.

“Research that the government has put in jeopardy includes efforts to improve the prospects of children who survive cancer, to understand at the molecular level how cancer spreads throughout the body, to predict the spread of infectious disease outbreaks, and to ease the pain of soldiers wounded on the battlefield,” Garber wrote in a statement.

In its complaint, Harvard says that the university “rejects antisemitism and discrimination in all of its forms and is actively making structural reforms to eradicate antisemitism on campus” but that the government “announced a sweeping freeze of funding for medical, scientific, technological, and other research that has nothing at all to do with antisemitism and Title VI compliance”.

“Moreover, Congress in Title VI set forth detailed procedures that the Government ‘shall’ satisfy before revoking federal funding based on discrimination concerns,” the complaint reads.

Harvard president Alan Garber reiterated that the Trump administration had doubled down on its response to the university’s refusal to comply with the administration’s demands, despite claims that the letter indicating Harvard’s federal research funding was at risk was sent by mistake.

“The government has, in addition to the initial freeze of $2.2 billion in funding, considered taking steps to freeze an additional $1 billion in grants, initiated numerous investigations of Harvard’s operations, threatened the education of international students, and announced that it is considering a revocation of Harvard’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status,” Garber wrote. “These actions have stark real-life consequences for patients, students, faculty, staff, researchers, and the standing of American higher education in the world.”

In a new lawsuit, Harvard University alleged the Trump administration is trying to “gain control of academic decision-making at Harvard”, several news outlets are reporting.

The university is fighting back against the administration’s threat to review about $9bn in federal funding after Harvard officials refused to comply with a list of demands that included appointing an outside overseer to ensure that the viewpoints being taught at the university were “diverse”.

In a letter announcing the university’s decision to reject Trump’s demands, Harvard president Alan Garber wrote: “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”