Seventeen universities — including Harvard, Yale and Stanford — have banned together to take on President Donald Trump’s ban on travel to the U.S. by refugees and citizens of seven mostly Muslim countries. In court papers, the schools states that the ban impedes their ability to recruit students, faculty and scholars from abroad, and threatens the “goals of educating tomorrow’s leaders from around the world.” The statement makes the point that international students, faculty and scholars “make significant contributions to their fields of study and to campus life.”
The universities filed papers on February 13th in Brooklyn federal court seeking a judge’s permission to join a lawsuit fighting the ban. The American Civil Liberties Union and immigrant rights groups’ lawsuit are leading a national order barring the government from relying on the ban to deport those who arrived on U.S. soil.
The other schools joining in the request are Brown, Carnegie Mellon, University of Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Emory, Johns Hopkins, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton and Vanderbilt.
