Sawt Falasteen - Harvard graduation overshadowed by Trump threats

Trump has made Harvard the central target of his campaign against elite US universities, which he has threatened with funding freezes and action against their foreign students over what he says is liberal bias and anti-Semitism.

A federal judge in Boston said she would issue an order that "gives some protection" to international students while courts consider the legality of Trump's effort to block Harvard from enrolling foreign students.

"We want to make sure there's no more shenanigans between now and then," said Harvard's lawyer Ian Gershengorn.

"Our students are terrified and we're (already) having people transfer" to other universities, he said.

In an eleventh-hour filing ahead of the hearing, the Trump administration issued a formal notice of intent to withdraw Harvard's ability to enrol foreign students -- kickstarting the process.

The filing gave Harvard 30 days to produce evidence showing why it should not be blocked from hosting and enrolling foreign students.

Judge Allison Burroughs had already temporarily paused the policy affecting some 27 percent of Harvard's student body, extending that pause Thursday.

She said she would seek to determine "whether they were terminated for a retaliatory motive."

A law professor present in the packed court said the Trump administration was prolonging the suffering of international students.

"Harvard is in this purgatory. What is an international student to do?" said the Harvard Law School graduate, who declined to be named.

- 'Bully and threaten' -

There also remained "this specter of other actions" the government could take to block Harvard having international students, she added.

The Ivy League institution has continually drawn Trump's ire while publicly rejecting his administration's repeated demands to give up control of recruitment, curricula and research choices.

"Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect, and all they're doing is getting in deeper and deeper," Trump said Wednesday.

Harvard president Alan Garber got a huge cheer Thursday when he mentioned international students attending the graduation with their families, saying it was "as it should be" -- but Garber did not mention the Trump fight directly.

He at one point received a standing ovation, which one student told AFP was "revealing of the community's pride and approval."

Garber has led the legal fightback in US academia after Trump targeted several prestigious universities -- including Columbia, which made sweeping concessions to the administration in an effort to restore $400 million of withdrawn federal grants.

He has acknowledged that Harvard does have issues with anti-Semitism and that it has struggled to ensure that a variety of views can be safely heard on campus.

Ahead of the ceremony, members of the Harvard band sporting distinctive crimson blazers and brandishing their instruments filed through the narrow streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts -- home to the elite school, America's oldest university.

In front of a huge stage, hundreds of students assembled to hear speeches, including one entirely in Latin, in a grassy precinct that was closed off to the public for security.

Many students from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government carried inflatable plastic globes at the ceremony to symbolize the international makeup of the school's student body.

"In the last two months it's been very difficult, I've been feeling a lot of vulnerability," said one such student, Lorena Mejia, 36, who graduated with a masters in public administration and wore robes marking her as a Colombian.

V.Said--SF-PST