Trump targeting of pro-Palestinian campus activists for deportation is unlawful, US judge rules

BOSTON — 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 by finding that the administration was chilling free speech on college campuses in violation of the U.S. 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 blasted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for having masked agents carrying out the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student who was taken into custody in Massachusetts after co-writing an opinion piece criticizing her school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza.

“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, an appointee of Republican President Ronald Reagan, said the government’s actions were in keeping with Trump’s broader efforts to limit free speech by 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.

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 have urged him to bar the administration from further carrying out what they call its “ideological deportation policy.”

Those plaintiffs include the American Association of University Professors and its chapters at Harvard, Rutgers and New York University, and the Middle East Studies Association, which together hailed the ruling as a landmark decision, affirming First Amendment protections for noncitizens.

“The administration’s ideological deportations dishonor the First Amendment and democracy,”