By Nate Raymond
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.
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.
His decision only assessed whether the administration had adopted an unlawful policy. Young has said he would determine what remedy to impose at a later phase of the case. Lawyers for the faculty groups have urged him to bar the administration from threatening such arrests and deportations going forward.
TRIAL CHALLENGED IMMIGRATION POLICY
Young, an appointee of Republican President Ronald Reagan, 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 the 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.
Lawyers for the faculty groups argued before Young that the administration’s actions ran afoul of the U.S. Constitution’s protections for political speech.
The U.S. Department of Justice under Trump countered that no such ideological deportation policy existed and that the administration was lawfully executing its wide discretion to enforce immigration laws for the justifiable purpose of ensuring national security and protecting Jewish students.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi, Leslie Adler and David Gregorio)
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