Min Ye, a professor of international relations at Boston University, finds herself thinking of a line from a famous Chinese poem: “Where the heart is at peace, there is my home.”

The White House has already moved to restrict foreign students at Harvard University and attempted to revoke the green cards and visas of pro-Palestinian student activists.

Harvard argues in the Monday court filing this approach shows the agencies violated the law in the way they abruptly froze university research grants, and that the federal government made no effort t...