Targeting pro-Palestinian activists on campuses is illegal, US court rules

A US judge ruled on Tuesday that President Donald Trump's administration violated the Constitution by adopting a policy of revoking visas, arresting, detaining and deporting foreign students and professors who engage in pro-Palestinian activism.

District Judge William Young of Boston sided with groups representing university professors, finding that the administration had suppressed free speech on college campuses, violating the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Young said officials from the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security "acted together to abuse the broad authority of their offices and target pro-Palestinian citizens of foreign countries primarily for their First Amendment-protected political speech."

"They did this to instill fear in other similarly pro-Palestinian foreigners, proactively (and effectively) suppressing lawful pro-Palestinian speech and deliberately denying these individuals (including the plaintiffs in this case) the right to free speech," Young wrote.

His decision currently only addresses whether the administration has adopted an illegal policy. Young said he would decide later in the process on any sanctions or measures to impose. Lawyers representing the professor groups have urged him to bar the administration from threatening such arrests and deportations in the future.

Young, who was appointed by Republican President Ronald Reagan, issued the ruling after a trial related to actions taken by the administration as part of Trump's tough immigration policies.

The lawsuit was filed in March, after immigration authorities arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia University – the first target of Trump's attempts to deport foreign students with pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel views.

Since then, the administration has revoked the visas of hundreds of students and scholars and ordered the arrest of some of them, including Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student who was arrested in Massachusetts by masked, plainclothes agents after she co-authored an article criticizing her university's response to Israel's war in Gaza.

In these and similar cases, courts have ordered the release of students detained by immigration authorities after they claimed they were arrested in retaliation for their pro-Palestinian activism, a violation of their First Amendment free speech rights.

Trump signed these executive orders following a wave of protests that rocked universities across the country, after Israel launched a war in Gaza in response to a Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.

Lawyers representing the professor groups argued that the administration's actions violated U.S. constitutional protections for political speech.

The US Department of Justice under the Trump administration argued, on the other hand, that no such ideological deportation policy existed and that the administration had lawfully used broad powers in enforcing immigration laws to preserve national security and protect Jewish students.