Protesters in Seattle rally against the targeting of pro-Palestinian international students. Photo by Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images
A federal judge in Boston is currently weighing what could become one of the most consequential cases in Donald Trump’s effort to deport people for their speech.
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Middle East Studies Association took the Trump administration to court for what they have dubbed an “ideological deportation policy” that has targeted Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, Badar Khan Suri, Yunseo Chung, and Mohsen Mahdawi, among others. Plaintiffs say the policy has chilled the speech of its noncitizen members as the administration seeks to retaliate against pro-Palestine students and faculty through visa revocations.
Attorneys for the government defendants – Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the State Department, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security, Acting Director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Todd Lyons, and President Donald Trump – have denied the policy’s existence and said the contested visa revocations relied on longstanding legal statutes.
But testimony during the two-week trial, including from immigration agents themselves, has cast doubt on that claim. Instead, the first major trial in Trump’s second term unmasked the administration’s shadowy operation targeting pro-Palestine activism from ground zero: college campuses.
Here’s what you need to know as the judge in the case weighs what is one of the most anticipated decisions this year:
What’s the underlying issue of the case?
At the heart of the case is the question of whether citizens and noncitizens are equal in the eyes of the First Amendment.
AAUP and other plaintiffs argue that noncitizens enjoy the same free speech protections afforded to citizens. They alleged that the Trump administration is chilling dissent in violation of First Amendment protections by revoking the visas of – and in some cases, arresting and attempting to deport – noncitizen pro-Palestinian students as part of a systematic “ideological deportation policy.”
The Trump administration argues there is no such policy, and despite initially saying citizens and noncitizens alike enjoy First Amendment protections, it later backtracked, claiming “nuances” related to national security, immigration, and foreign policy.
In some of the high-profile student cases, the government has relied on an obscure Immigration and Nationality Act provision that empowers the secretary of state to render a noncitizen inadmissible if the secretary believes their activities or presence would have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”
But legal experts have cast doubt on the constitutionality of that provision.
Conor Fitzpatrick, a supervising senior attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said the provision itself contradicts the First Amendment, which bans Congress from making a law abridging freedom of speech, and it goes against core American values of liberty.
“And even setting both of those aside, on a purely practical level, the idea that Rümeysa Öztürk or Mahmoud Khalil or any of these other individual students at American universities are impeding American foreign policy is absurd," Fitzpatrick said. “There's just no legitimate support for the idea that a grad student at Columbia has somehow hampered American foreign policy.”