The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law filed suit against the Department of Education on Wednesday in an attempt to compel the release of a long-delayed report on foreign funding to U.S. colleges and universities, as well as moved to intervene in a separate lawsuit brought by a university association attempting to block the release of that report.

The group had previously filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking the release of a report produced by the department identifying individual foreign donors to U.S. institutions of higher education. The new lawsuit seeks to compel the production of that report after the department failed to respond to the FOIA request.

Currently the release of that report is barred by a temporary restraining order by a federal district court judge, following a lawsuit by the Association of American Universities. The Brandeis Center seeks to intervene in that lawsuit. The restraining order is set to expire on Wednesday, but could be extended.

“For months, we have been fighting to expose billions of dollars in foreign funding flowing into American universities while the identities of those providing the money remain hidden,” Brandeis Center CEO Kenneth Marcus said in a statement. “The public deserves the facts about whether foreign governments and institutions are using financial relationships to influence what happens in the classroom, how universities operate, and the alarming rise of anti-Semitism on our campuses. After six delays and a court order blocking disclosure, we are taking legal action to ensure this information does not remain hidden.”

Paul Eckles, senior litigation counsel at the Brandeis Center, said that the FOIA suit was the “logical next step” in seeking the disclosure of the documents, and that intervening as a party in the AAU lawsuit — pending the approval of the judge in the case — would allow the Brandeis Center to “make fully the arguments for why this information should be available to the public.”

Becoming a party to the lawsuit would allow the Brandeis Center to participate in briefing and advocacy in the case, receive access to the administrative record produced in the case and appeal it if the court decides to block the release of the funding data.

Eckles said that the Brandeis Center anticipates that the two cases will ultimately be heard by the same judge to reach a ruling in both on whether the information can be released.

“It’s just another procedural step that we felt we needed to take to make sure our rights are fully protected and that we’ve got a clear legal basis to advocate and enforce our FOIA request,” Eckles continued. “We feel strongly that the public deserves to have this information, and it makes you wonder why the universities are fighting so hard to prevent this information from being made public?”

The AAU has argued that releasing the identities of individual donors would compromise and violate their expectation of anonymity under which the donations were given and potentially expose foreign dissidents abroad to retaliation. The Department of Education has said that it only seeks to expose foreign organizations, not individuals, donating to U.S. campuses.

Eckles added that the size and scope of the donations indicates that much of the funding in question is coming from governmental and quasi-governmental sources in countries including Qatar and China.

“The public deserves the ability to scrutinize just what the relationship is, what the specific legal entity is, and again, what sort of strings are coming attached with these donations,” Eckles said.