The Department of Homeland Security informed Harvard that it can no longer enroll international students, and Harvard has sued for this brazen First Amendment violation and will seek, and get, a temporary restraining order against the government.

What is extraordinary and frightening about the behavior of the miscreants in Washington DC is that they do things for which there is no legal basis, and for which they know there is no legal basis.  It is what Trump has always done throughout his career:  he pushes the limits, to see what the consequences might be.  He did this with his extortion of prominent law firms, many of whom caved, but those that didn't have already secured temporary and permanent injunctions from the courts (and apparently the Trumpistas haven't bothered to appeal the injunctions, which is very telling).

Columbia University, now notoriously, capitulated.  Since Harvard is the first to refuse the extortion, the Trumpistas are now testing all their weapons, no matter how illegal, against Harvard.  My hope is that Harvard's resistance will be duplicated by other schools, and that at some point the Trumpistas will give up, and just go back to changing federal funding formulas legally.

UPDATE:  Although Harvard only filed suit this morning, a federal judge has already enjoined DHS from blocking international student enrollment at Harvard.  That's telling about how beyond the pale this is.

ANOTHER:  A philosopher elsewhere writes:

The Trump regime know that they can drive away foreign students even if their power-grabs are slapped down within 24 hours.  The point is to create uncertainty, and make it less attractive to enroll.

You don't need to put actual poison in the soup in order to scare customers away from the restaurant; all you need to do is convince enough people that there is some chance that the soup is poisoned.  They will eat elsewhere. 

Accordingly, Harvard — and other US universities — are going to see their foreign enrollment crash, and with it a lot of their cash revenues. If Trump really cared about the foreign trade imbalance, he would be doing anything to help one of America's most successful domestic industries that brings millions of customers to our shore, bring billions in tuition payments. But they are willing to destroy a successful US export in order to destroy independent thought. 

The regime henchmen really are revolutionaries of a ruthlessness that our feeble leftists can only dream of. The thought police of the left come wagging fingers; the thought police of the right come swinging truncheons.  Let's hope we survive this.