Trump targeting of pro-Palestinian campus activists for deportation is unlawful, US judge rules

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By Nate Raymond and Luc Cohen

BOSTON (Reuters) -A U.S. judge ruled on Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s administration had acted unconstitutionally by adopting a policy of revoking visas, arresting, detaining and deporting foreign students and faculty engaged in pro-Palestinian advocacy.

In a scathing 161-page ruling, U.S. District Judge William Young in Boston sided with groups representing university faculty by finding that the administration was chilling free speech on college campuses in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.

Young said officials of the U.S. Departments of State and Homeland Security “acted in concert to misuse the sweeping powers of their respective offices to target noncitizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their First Amendment protected political speech.”

“They did so in order to strike fear into similarly situated non-citizen pro-Palestinian individuals, pro-actively (and effectively) curbing lawful pro-Palestinian speech and intentionally denying such individuals (including the plaintiffs here) the freedom of speech that is their right,” Young wrote.

Young blasted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for having masked agents carrying out the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student who was taken into custody in Massachusetts after co-writing an opinion piece criticizing her school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza.

“To us, masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan,” Young wrote. “In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police.”

Young, an appointee of Republican President Ronald Reagan, said the government’s actions were in keeping with Trump’s broader efforts to limit free speech by targeting law firms, universities and media outlets.

“While the President naturally seeks warm cheering and gladsome, welcoming acceptance of his views, in the real world he’ll settle for sullen silence and obedience,” Young wrote.

Young said he would determine what remedy to impose at a later point in the case, which he called perhaps the most important his court ever heard. Lawyers for the plaintiffs have urged him to bar the administration from further carrying out what they call its “ideological deportation policy”.

Those plaintiffs include the American Association of University Professors and its chapters at Harvard, Rutgers and New York University, and the Middle East Studies Association, which together hailed the ruling as a landmark decision, affirming First Amendment protections for noncitizens.

“The administration’s ideological deportations dishonor the First Amendment and democracy,” Ramya Krishnan, a lawyer for the plaintiffs at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said in a statement.

White House spokesperson Liz Huston in a statement vowed to pursue an appeal of what she called “an outrageous ruling that hampers the safety and security of our nation.”

“Studying in the United States is a privilege that the Trump administration will not allow to foreign nationals who endanger America’s national security or imperil campus safety,” Huston said.

CASE CHALLENGED IMMIGRATION POLICY

Young issued the ruling after presiding over a trial in a challenge to actions the administration undertook as part of the Republican president’s strict immigration enforcement.

Trump signed executive orders in January directing federal agencies to “vigorously” combat anti-Semitism 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.

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 visas of hundreds of students and scholars and ordered the arrest of some, including Ozturk.

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.

Despite the adverse court rulings, the Trump administration is still pushing to deport the students. Young’s ruling came as the administration was before the Manhattan-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, seeking to overturn court orders that freed Ozturk and Mohsen Mahdawi, a pro-Palestinian Columbia University student, from immigration custody.

Justice Department lawyer Tyler Becker told a three-judge panel the administration may seek to re-detain Ozturk if it wins on appeal.

Young, in his ruling, said he feared Trump believes “the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values.”

In an unusual move, the judge included a copy of a threatening message he received via a postcard from an anonymous sender that read, “Trump has pardons and tanks …. what do you have?”

“Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty,” Young replied in his ruling. “Together, We the People of the United States –- you and me — have our magnificent Constitution. Here’s how that works out in a specific case.”

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston and Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi, David Gregorio and Lisa Shumaker)