Sept. 30 (UPI) — A federal judge ruled Tuesday that Trump administration officials used deportations of foreign students with pro-Palestinian views to squelch the free speech rights of non-citizens and discourage campus protests.
U.S. District Court Judge William Young’s ruling is in response to a lawsuit that raised constitutional alarms about the detentions and threatened deportations of Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts University’s Rumeysa Ozturk, both of whom had participated in protests against Israel’s military campaigns in Gaza.
The pair of graduate students had become the public faces of the Trump administration’s efforts to curb what it has described as disruptive activities by foreign students that run contrary to U.S. interests.
In his sharply worded ruling, Young wrote that evidence presented during the bench trial clearly showed that Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and the Secretary of State Marco Rubio used their authority to “intentionally to chill the rights to freedom of speech and peacefully to assemble” of non-citizen scholars and students studying in the United States.
“No one’s freedom of speech is unlimited, of course, but these limits are the same for both citizens and non-citizens alike,” Young wrote.
The case was brought earlier by the national American Association of University Professors, including its Harvard, Rutgers and New York University chapters, as well as the Middle East Studies Association.
During a bench trial, it was revealed that federal authorities used doxxing website Canary, which contains information on more than 5,000 people critical of Israel, to review the names of student protestors.
Young wrote that Trump administration officials never intended to deport all pro-Palestinian non-citizens because it would have “raised a major outcry.”
Instead, he wrote that the officials used the Immigration and Nationality Act in ways it had never been used before to publicly deport a few who spoke out with “the goal of tamping down pro-Palestinian student protests and terrorizing similarly situated non-citizen (and other) pro-Palestinians into silence because their views were unwelcome.”
Young, who was appointed by Reagan, continued that it was important to uphold the free speech rights of even non-citizens advocating for a cause in a land far away.
He wrote that if Homeland Security could be “weaponized” against the group, it was possible for the president to use other agencies, such as the IRS or Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, against his “ever growing list of ‘enemies’ or opponents he ‘hates.”
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