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, finding that the administration was chilling free speech on college campuses in violation of the 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, an appointee of Republican President Ronald Reagan, said the government’s actions were in keeping with Trump’s broader efforts to limit free speech, 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.
In his ruling, Young blasted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for having agents mask up before arresting some people, saying it was doing so for a “single reason — to terrorize Americans into quiescence.”
“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 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 hailed the ruling as a landmark ruling that affirmed that the First Amendment protects noncitizens. The case was filed by the American Association of University Professors and its chapters at Harvard, Rutgers and New York University, and the Middle East Studies Association.
“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.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
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 hardline immigration agenda.
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 Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student who was taken into custody in Massachusetts by masked and plainclothes agents after co-writing an opinion piece criticizing her school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza.
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.
In a separate case, the Manhattan-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was due on Tuesday to hear arguments in the administration’s challenges to court rulings that led to the release of Ozturk and pro-Palestinian Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi from immigration custody.
The administration is arguing the courts exceeded their authority.
The three-judge panel set to hear the arguments includes two judges appointed by Trump during his first term, Circuit Judges William Nardini and Steven Menashi. The third, Chief Circuit Judge Debra Ann Livingston, was appointed by Republican President George W. Bush.
CRACKDOWN FOLLOWS GAZA PROTESTS
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.
In ruling against the administration, Young in an unusual move included in his ruling a copy of a threatening message he received had 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, Leslie Adler and David Gregorio)
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