US judge to restrict Trump efforts to deport pro-Palestinian campus activists

By Nate Raymond

BOSTON, Jan 15 (Reuters) – A federal judge said on Thursday he would issue an order designed to prevent President Donald Trump’s administration from exacting “retribution” against academics who challenged the arresting, detaining and deporting non-citizen, pro-Palestinian activists on U.S. college campuses.

U.S. District Judge William Young spoke at a hearing in Boston federal court, after finding in September that the U.S. Departments of State and Homeland Security violated the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment by chilling the free speech of non-citizen academics on college campuses.

“The big problem in this case is that the cabinet secretaries, and ostensibly, the president of the United States, are not honoring the First Amendment,” Young said.

Young, who was appointed by Republican President Ronald Reagan and had issued a scathing ruling in the case criticizing Trump’s actions, called the administration’s abridgment of First Amendment rights “appalling,” and said top officials under Trump had adopted “a fearful approach to freedom.”

“We cast around the word ‘authoritarian,'” Young said. “I don’t, in this context, treat that in a pejorative sense, and I use it carefully, but it’s fairly clear that this president believes, as an authoritarian, that when he speaks, everyone, everyone in Article II is going to toe the line absolutely.”

Article II is the part of the Constitution governing the executive branch.

The White House had no immediate comment, but it has previously vowed to appeal Young’s earlier September ruling, which a spokesperson called “outrageous” and said would hamper national security.

The judge said he would limit the reach of his order to members of academic associations including the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association that challenged the administration’s actions.

Those groups had sought an order blocking the administration’s practices nationally. Their lawyer, Ramya Krishnan at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said only such a broad order could “effectively remediate the chill that your honor recognized.”

Young called their proposal “overbroad” but said he would instead issue an order on January 22 establishing a presumption that any change to the immigration status of the plaintiff groups’ members was in retribution for their participation in the case. Young said he would then require the government to prove in court it was seeking to deport them for “appropriate” reasons.

The lawsuit was filed last year by groups representing university faculty after immigration authorities in March 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.

The Homeland Security Department, in announcing Khalil’s arrest, cited executive orders Trump signed in January 2025 after taking office directing federal agencies to “vigorously” combat antisemitism 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.

Since then, the administration has canceled the visas of numerous other students and scholars and arrested several, including 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.

Both have since been released from immigration custody at the direction of federal judges hearing challenges to their detention. A federal appeals court on Thursday overturned the ruling in Khalil’s case, opening the door to his eventual re-detention. He plans to appeal.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; editing by Deepa Babington, Alexia Garamfalvi and David Gregorio)