The Trump administration’s push earlier this year to arrest and deport international students for their pro-Palestinian activism was illegal, a federal judge ruled Tuesday, calling the crackdown a “truly scandalous and unconstitutional suppression of free speech.”
In a sweeping rebuke, U.S. District Judge William Young in Boston said that the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department sought to target noncitizens “for speaking out” with the “goal of tamping down pro-Palestinian student protests and terrorizing similarly situated” students.
Young decried the administration’s conduct in striking terms, quoting President Ronald Reagan’s declaration that freedom must “be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.” Young, a Reagan appointee, described the case as “perhaps the most important ever to fall within the jurisdiction of this district court.” He said he would decide an appropriate remedy for the Trump administration’s conduct after a future hearing.
Starting in early March, immigration authorities launched a campaign to detain and deport noncitizen students at U.S. universities who had been active in opposing Israel’s war in Gaza. Those arrested were not accused of any crime and spent weeks confined in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities, in some cases hundreds of miles away from where they lived.
The case in Boston, brought by a union of university professors, accused the Trump administration of having an unconstitutional policy of deporting people based on their political views. The intent and effect of the policy, lawyers for the plaintiffs wrote in a court filing, has been “to terrify noncitizens into silence.”
Trump and other officials hailed the detentions as part of a fight against antisemitism, alleging without evidence that the targeted students promoted violence or were pro-Hamas. The Homeland Security, Justice and State departments did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The bench trial—decided by a judge rather than a jury—sought to answer the question of whether noncitizens in the United States have the same rights to freedom of speech as citizens.
To pursue and remove noncitizen protesters, the Trump administration deployed the immigration enforcement apparatus in unprecedented ways, according to witness testimony. Senior administration officials tasked personnel at the Department of Homeland Security who normally analyze transnational criminal networks to instead produce reports on students involved in pro-Palestinian protests, the witnesses said.
The analysts relied heavily on thousands of profiles generated by Canary Mission, an opaque pro-Israel group that says it documents individuals who “promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews” on college campuses. Working largely from Canary Mission’s list, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), an arm of DHS, generated between 100 and 200 reports on student protesters, a DHS official testified during the trial.
DHS then referred dozens of such reports to the State Department, recommending that it revoke the visas and green cards of those individuals, paving the way for their removal. Within weeks, several were arrested by masked agents in plainclothes and flown to detention facilities in Louisiana and Texas.
HSI officials and agents testified during the trial that before this year, they had never been asked to compile reports on student protesters, nor to conduct arrests of noncitizen students because their immigration status had changed. The trial showed that the administration detained the students based on their speech, the judge ruled, while its inflammatory allegations against them remained unsubstantiated.
When Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts graduate student in child development from Turkey, was seized by masked agents outside her home near Boston in March, DHS said in a statement that she had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” Testimony showed that Ozturk’s visa was revoked based only on an op-ed that she had co-written with three other people for the Tufts student newspaper more than a year earlier. The piece criticized the university’s response to the war in Gaza.
The critique offered by the op-ed was also endorsed by several student groups, including one that was subsequently temporarily banned on campus. John Armstrong, a senior consular official at the State Department, testified that this indirect association was enough to warrant revoking Ozturk’s visa without her knowledge—even though DHS officials found no evidence she had engaged in antisemitic activity or supported terrorism.
Ozturk spent more than six weeks at an ICE detention facility in Louisiana before a federal judge ordered her release.
In filings, lawyers for the plaintiffs and the government clashed over the question of whether noncitizens have the same First Amendment rights as citizens. In a court document, lawyers for the Justice Department argued that noncitizens’ right to freedom of speech is already constrained, pointing to the fact that they are lawfully prohibited from donating to political candidates.
But the plaintiffs’ lawyers cited decisions by multiple courts affirming that noncitizens who were lawfully admitted to the country are entitled to “the full panoply” of First Amendment rights.
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