Battle heats up: Earlier this month, the Trump administration, which has declared war on elite universities and threatened to pull their funding, "sent Harvard a list of demands that included auditing professors for plagiarism, reporting to the federal government any international students accused of misconduct, and appointing an outside overseer to make sure that academic departments were 'viewpoint diverse,'" per The New York Times. The administration has repeatedly voiced that elite schools' failure to act to stamp out antisemitism on campus is part of the reason they're being targeted.
Then, last week, Harvard said it would not comply with what it says are unlawful demands by the administration, which led to the Trump administration pulling its funding.
"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," writes Harvard President Alan Garber. Now, Harvard is filing suit, in federal court in Massachusetts, saying the government's punitive actions show it's trying to wield "leverage to gain control of academic decision-making at Harvard."
"I read the Harvard lawsuit," writes journalist Kelsey Piper on X, "and it looks like they have a slam-dunk case just in that Congress gave a bunch of specific instructions about how Title VI termination of grants was required to be conducted, which the administration just totally ignored." Here's Nico Perrino, of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, on the lawsuit:
Harvard's lawsuit is straightforward because the government's actions were straightforward.
- - The government may not "interfere with private actors' speech to advance its own vision of ideological balance" (Moody v. NetChoice).
The government demanded Harvard achieve… pic.twitter.com/azvSXjGW1R
— Nico Perrino (@NicoPerrino) April 22, 2025
Look, I'm torn here. Attacks on academic freedom are very, very wrong. But perhaps I'm most frustrated because pulling federal support for universities—especially those with $53 billion dollar endowments—is something I would love to see a Republican administration do, in the proper way and from a place of principle; it's insane that taxpayers in Burlington, Iowa, or Killeen, Texas, are forced to subsidize Harvard.
This, unfortunately, is not the way. And it's not likely to succeed.
Democrats growing a backbone (but what's the point?): On Monday, U.S. Reps. Robert Garcia (D–Calif.), Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D–Fla.), Yassamin Ansari (D–Ariz.), and Maxine E. Dexter (D–Ore.) met with U.S. ambassador to El Salvador William H. Duncan, in San Salvador. The representatives, all relatively unknown on the national stage, urged Duncan to secure the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man married to a U.S. citizen, who had been living in Maryland for the last 13 years, who had received protection from deportation back to his native country due to a credible threat of persecution there, but was deported anyway on March 15 and held in El Salvador's maximum-security Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT.
The Trump administration has claimed it can't really do anything to get Abrego Garcia back, despite being ordered by the Supreme Court to "facilitate" his return. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele was chumming around with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office as recently as last week, so it's not plausible that there's no diplomatic means available to ensure the wrongly deported man returns to the U.S. to receive the ability to contest in court the MS-13 allegations that have led to his deportation.
The Democratic representatives also spoke with U.S. embassy officials about the case of Venezuelan makeup artist Andry Jose Hernandez Romero, who had been living in America before being deported to El Salvador (a country he's not from). Hernandez came to the U.S. because he was worried about persecution back in Venezuela for being gay, but U.S. officials deported him due to misreading his crown tattoos—a reference to Epiphany celebrations for which his hometown is famous—as evidence of Tren de Aragua gang affiliation.
Nothing is working. "We left that meeting with absolutely zero indication that this administration is going to facilitate, or wants to facilitate, the return of Abrego Garcia back to the United States so he can go through due process," Frost told reporters.
This is on the heels of Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen's meeting with Abrego Garcia last week. "After two days of resistance from Mr. Bukele's government, Salvadoran officials allowed Mr. Van Hollen to meet with Mr. Abrego Garcia face to face, delivering him unexpectedly to the senator's hotel for a meeting that appeared staged to emphasize how well he was being treated," reports The New York Times. Bukele had posted a photo of the meeting to X, reporting that Abrego Garcia was "miraculously risen from the 'death camps' & 'torture', now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!" Margaritas never existed, claims Van Hollen; salt-rimmed glasses had been put in front of the men by a Bukele aide. "This is a lesson into the lengths that President Bukele will do to deceive people about what's going on," added Van Hollen, who also told reporters that Bukele's people had tried to get Van Hollen to meet Abrego Garcia near the hotel pool, ostensibly to make their planned photo op even better. More on that here, from The Wall Street Journal.
Scenes from New York: "The average upfront cost of moving in the city—including a broker fee, one month's rent and security deposit—was nearly $13,000 last year, the most since 2017," reports The New York Times. Now, brokers' fees are being made illegal; will be interesting to see how landlords react and what happens to rent prices.
QUICK HITS
- What would a Taiwan invasion actually look like? Michael Beckley has answers:
- "When Elon Musk and President Donald Trump commanded all federal workers to submit weekly emails listing five accomplishments, they warned of harsh consequences: Failure to comply would count as a resignation," reports The Washington Post. "In a briefing for top human resources officers across government held just two days after Musk's directive went out to all federal employees on Feb. 22, the Office of Personnel Management said the initiative was voluntary and noncompliance would not be considered a resignation, according to an email obtained by The Post." This is actually a bummer: Being forced to justify one's job, when it's on the taxpayer's dime, is kind of amazing (and not difficult at all, in my opinion).
- Classy:
Today there were major shifts in global leaderships.
Evil is being defeated by the hand of God.
— Marjorie Taylor Greene ???????? (@mtgreenee) April 21, 2025
- More bloodbath: "US stocks tumbled as President Donald Trump called on the Federal Reserve chair to cut interest rates amid mounting signs his trade war is pushing the economy toward recession," reports Bloomberg. "The dollar fell with long-dated Treasuries, while gold rallied."
- Expect more sloppiness like this:
1) Immigration officials tell Japanese college student they're deporting him. He has a fishing violation.
2) Media covers story
3) Immigration officials say never mindhttps://t.co/fxS4cUahNQ
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) April 19, 2025
- "Brazil and Argentina are emerging as early winners in the global trade war that's upending agricultural markets," reports Bloomberg. "The newest opportunity seems to be meat. US President Donald Trump's tariffs on eight of America's top 10 beef buyers have already redrawn trade flows, raising exports of Brazilian beef to halal markets including Algeria and Turkey. Japan, America's second largest beef client, is now in advanced talks to start buying cheaper meat from Brazil."
- Excellent thread on rule of law, by Reason's Stephanie Slade:
I gather not everyone groks why I find this so troubling. So let's talk about what we mean when we say "rule of law." More specifically, let's talk about what the Nobel Prize–winning economist Friedrich Hayek wrote about it.
(A thread.)https://t.co/PM58eNAfyg
— (Stephanie) Slade (@sladesr) April 21, 2025
"The key thing about rule of law is that we all know ahead of time what is legal and what is not, so that we can act accordingly," writes Slade, riffing on Friedrich Hayek. "Laws need to be published. They need to be internally consistent. And they need to be *forward-looking* only. You can't retroactively declare something a crime and then go after people for things they already did. They also need to bind government actors just as they do members of the public. That, really, is the crucial distinction between 'rule of law' and its opposite, 'arbitrary rule,' or 'rule of man,' where the law just is whatever the guy in power says it is at any given moment."
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