Trump-backed targeting of pro-Palestinian campus activs for deportation is unlawful, US judge rules | World News
A US judge ruled on Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s adminration chilled free speech in violation of the US Constitution adopting a policy of revoking the visas of foreign students and faculty who engage in pro-Palestinian advocacy, and arresting, detaining and deporting them.
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US Drict Judge William Young in Boston sided with groups representing university faculty in finding that the adminration was chilling free speech on college campuses in violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment.
His decision only assessed whether the adminration 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 adminration 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 adminration 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 adminration 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 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 immigration authorities after they argued the adminration 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 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 adminration’s actions ran afoul of the US Constitution’s protections for political speech.
The US Department of Justice under Trump countered that no such no ideological deportation policy exed and that the adminration was lawfully executing its wide discretion to enforce immigration laws for the justifiable purpose of ensuring national security and protecting Jewish students.
