Federal judge says Trump policy targeting pro-Palestinian campus activists unlawful

A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that President Donald Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus activists was unlawful, and that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio violated the First Amendment by targeting pro-Palestinian students for deportation to instil fear and curb lawful speech. In a 161-page decision, US District Judge William Young, appointed by former President Ronald Reagan, was unsparing not only in his views of Noem and Rubio's actions, but also of Trump, who he said approves of “truly scandalous and unconstitutional suppression of free speech” on the part of two senior administration officials. “The president’s palpable misunderstanding that the government simply cannot seek retribution for speech he disdains poses a great threat to Americans’ freedom of speech,” he wrote. The judge sided with university associations who argued that the administration’s policy was to revoke the visas and green cards of those critical of the war Gaza.

The ruling also referred to the “nature” of Trump himself, pegging him as a bully prone to “hollow bragging.”

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The judge said Kristi Noem and Marco Rubio, along with their officials and agents, worked together 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.”

He called the case “perhaps the most important ever to fall within the jurisdiction of this district court.”

The decision follows a roughly two-week trial—the first major trial of Trump’s second administration—over the arrests and efforts to deport foreign-born students and faculty members linked to campus demonstrations.

Green card-holding professors at US universities testified that the high-profile arrests of outspoken students, like former Columbia University pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk, made them fearful and stifled their speech.

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Rubio had deemed several of the campus demonstrators threats to the nation’s foreign policy, invoking a statute that makes deportable any noncitizen whose “presence and activities in the United States” is thought to have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”

In a memo explaining the apparent threat posed by Khalil, Rubio cited the student’s beliefs as justification for his deportation.

Justice Department lawyers said the suggestion that the administration is targeting noncitizens based on their pro-Palestinian advocacy is “silly” and that no such policy exists. “This policy is a product of the imagination and creative conjuring of the plaintiffs,” said department attorney William Kanellis.

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‘He ignores everything and keeps bullying ahead’

Young’s ruling spent a dozen of its final pages focused on Trump himself.

The judge quoted his own wife to say Trump “seems to be winning. He ignores everything and keeps bullying ahead,” and annotated the remark across several pages.

A section on “retribution” detailed Trump’s attacks on law firms, higher education and the media as “necessary background to frame the problem this President has with the First Amendment.”

In the final paragraphs of his ruling, the judge quoted former President Reagan’s Inauguration speech, when he said, “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction.”