By Nate Raymond
FILE PHOTO: The U.S. Department of Education building in Washington
BOSTON, April 3 (Reuters) - The Trump administration cannot force public universities in 17 U.S. states to turn over sweeping amounts of data so it can examine whether they have ceased considering race as an admissions factor, a federal judge ruled on Friday.
U.S. District Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV in Boston issued a preliminary injunction at the request of those states' Democratic attorneys general, who are suing over a new data reporting requirement the Department of Education adopted in a survey used to gather information from colleges.
The department sought seven years of admissions data on the race and sex of students to track compliance with the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling ending affirmative action in higher education.
New York Attorney General Letitia James hailed the ruling, saying in a statement that "schools should not have to scramble to produce years of sensitive information to satisfy an arbitrary and unlawful demand."
The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment.
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The states, which also include California and Massachusetts, sued last month, arguing the survey's rushed implementation left universities vulnerable to inadvertent errors that could lead them to face penalties and investigations into their practices.
The department requested the data through an Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System survey that it created at the direction of President Donald Trump, a Republican. In an August memorandum, he cited a lack of data to assess whether race remained an admissions factor given the "rampant use" by universities of what he called "hidden racial proxies."
Saylor ruled the Education Department had the statutory authority to seek such data but he said the "rushed and chaotic manner" by which it adopted the new requirements led it to not properly engage with universities about problems they foresaw.
Such problems were compounded by the administration's efforts to dismantle the Education Department, leaving few employees in its National Center for Education Statistics to manage the surveys following job cuts, the judge said.
After the states sued, Saylor, who was appointed by Republican President George W. Bush, issued temporary restraining orders that extended until Monday the deadline for their schools to complete the survey while he considered the case.
On Tuesday he issued an order similarly extending the deadline for dozens of other public and private universities while he considers whether they too deserve an injunction.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by William Mallard)