Trump administration's policy against pro-Palestinian campus activists unlawful, says US judge
Lawyers for the faculty groups have urged him to bar the Trump administration from threatening such arrests and deportations going forward.
A U.S. judge ruled on Tuesday that President Donald Trump's administration chilled free speech in violation of the U.S. Constitution by adopting a policy of revoking the visas of foreign students and faculty who engage in pro-Palestinian advocacy, and arresting, detaining and deporting them.
U.S. District Judge William Young in Boston sided with groups representing university faculty in finding that the administration was chilling free speech on college campuses in violation of the Constitution's First Amendment.
His decision only assessed whether the administration had adopted an unlawful policy. Young has said he would determine what remedy to impose at a later phase of the case. Lawyers for the faculty groups have urged him to bar the Trump administration from threatening such arrests and deportations going forward.
Young, an appointee of Republican President Ronald Reagan, issued the ruling after presiding over a trial in a challenge to actions the administration undertook as part of the Republican president's hardline immigration agenda.
The lawsuit was filed in March after immigration authorities arrested recent Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, the first target of Trump's effort to deport non-citizen students with pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel views.
Since then, the administration has canceled the visas of hundreds of students and scholars and ordered the arrest of some, including Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student who was taken into custody in Massachusetts by masked and plainclothes agents after co-writing an opinion piece criticizing her school's response to Israel's war in Gaza.
In those cases and others, judges have ordered the release of students detained by immigration authorities after they argued the administration retaliated against them for their pro-Palestinian advocacy in violation of their First Amendment free-speech rights.
Their arrests form the basis of the case before Young, which was filed by the American Association of University Professors and its chapters at Harvard, Rutgers and New York University, and the Middle East Studies Association.
They argued the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security began targeting pro-Palestinian campus advocates after Trump signed executive orders in January directing agencies to protect Americans from non-citizens who “espouse hateful ideology” and to "vigorously" combat anti-Semitism.
Trump signed those executive orders in the wake of protests that roiled college campuses nationwide after Israel launched its war in Gaza in response to the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023.
Lawyers for the faculty groups argued that the administration's actions ran afoul of the U.S. Constitution's protections for political speech.
The U.S. Department of Justice under Trump countered that no such no ideological deportation policy existed and that the administration was lawfully executing its wide discretion to enforce immigration laws for the justifiable purpose of ensuring national security and protecting Jewish students.
