A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from forcing universities to submit seven years of comprehensive data on applicants and admitted students — including grade point averages and test scores — to prove they do not illegally consider race in admissions.
Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV of the US District Court of Massachusetts issued his order Friday night in response to a lawsuit filed by California and 16 other Democratic-led states.
The judge’s preliminary injunction applies only to public colleges and universities in the states that sued while the case is still pending.
In the meantime, the decision grants permission to the University of California and California State University systems, which said in court that the data request was cumbersome, urgent, jeopardized student privacy and required administrators to track hard-to-find information on hundreds of thousands of students on individual campuses who log in differently. In addition to racial information and GPA, the Trump administration requested standardized test scores, grant aid rates and family income.
Separately this week, Saylor also granted an extension until April 14 to members of the Assn. of American Universities to submit the same data while the group opposed the block order of its 69 US schools. Members of this organization include Stanford and USC.
California accuses government of ‘fishing expedition’
The US Department of Education’s new policy, announced in August, broadly expands long-standing federal data collection on universities. It said schools must share information by March 18.
Saylor twice extended the deadline while considering arguments from both sides on the injunction.
Trump administration officials have said they have requested information from schools to prove they are not illegally targeting race in admissions. The Supreme Court struck down these affirmative action policies in 2023.
In that case, the justices said colleges can consider how race has shaped students’ lives when writing about the theme in admissions essays. In California, Proposition 209 has prohibited community colleges and universities from considering race in admissions since 1997.
When he filed a California lawsuit against the Trump administration, Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta called the request a “fishing expedition” that “required unprecedented amounts of information from our colleges and universities under the guise of following human rights law.”
Democratic states argued in their legal filing that the government was turning the nonpartisan National Center for Education Statistics into “a vehicle for law enforcement and the advancement of party policy goals.”
Trump higher education is investigating
The Trump administration has accused several elite institutions, including the UC system, of violating the law by using race in admissions and discriminating against white and Asian-American students. This year, the government joined a lawsuit against UCLA in federal court, alleging that the David Geffen School of Medicine illegally engaged in admissions practices. UC and UCLA said they are following federal and California law.
Last week, the Justice Department said it was investigating whether medical schools at UC San Diego and Stanford discriminated against students. As part of that investigation, the Justice Department is demanding that medical schools turn over personal and academic student data by April 24 or face federal funding cuts. The schools said they follow state and federal law on student admissions and review federal applications.
The medical school information requested includes data about students’ race, Medical College Admission Test scores, undergraduate GPAs, home ZIP codes, citizenship status, admissions essays, and whether they are legacies or family donors to the schools.
In multiple investigations and legal filings since last year, the Trump administration has widely argued that colleges and universities use personal statements and other proxies, such as income levels or ZIP Codes, to illegally determine the race of applicants.
An August 2025 government memo at the center of the legal dispute ordered Education Secretary Linda McMahon to obtain more information from colleges to “provide adequate transparency in admissions.
“If the collection of data is delayed, the public release of admissions statistics will be delayed, and for the rest of the year college applicants will be denied full information about their chances of getting a coveted spot at the schools of their dreams based on race, gender, and other factors,” government attorneys wrote in the court filing. “These students may spend money on colleges where they have no realistic chance of being accepted.”
The Justice Department said in court filings as of March 23, 1,700 colleges and universities had either completed their submissions or were eligible for an extension after submitting partial reports.
If colleges don’t submit the data, the government can fine them under the Higher Education Act of 1965, which details requirements for colleges that receive federal student financial aid, such as Pell Grants.
