In a landmark decision issued on September 30, 2025, a federal court ruled that the Trump administration, as part of a broad assault on our civil rights, violated the First Amendment in carrying out a policy of arresting, detaining, and deporting noncitizen students and faculty members for ideological reasons. The AAUP, the Middle Eastern Studies Association (MESA), and several AAUP chapters brought the suit with the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, requesting that the court block the Trump administration from continuing to implement the policy and thereby suppress speech (typically pro-Palestinian speech) that Trump opposed. While the court found that the Trump administration has violated the First Amendment, it will hear arguments from the parties before issuing a remedial order.
A two-week trial in July was the first major trial of President Trump’s second term and included the testimony of fifteen witnesses, including a number of brave AAUP members, forcing the disclosure of a wealth of new details about the policy and its devastating effects on campuses nationwide. See a summary of the disclosures here.
In his decision, Judge William G. Young had little trouble finding that the Trump administration targeted noncitizens because they voiced positions that Trump opposed. “The intent of the Secretaries [of State and the Department of Homeland Security] was . . . to target a few for speaking out and then use the full rigor of the Immigration and Nationality Act (in ways it had never been used before) to have them publicly deported 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.”
The lengths the Trump administration went to initiate the deportations was astounding: It based many of the proposed deportations on anonymous reports from the website of Canary Mission (a partisan organization that publishes the names of thousands of individuals protesting Israel’s actions), it transferred agents from criminal investigations to review the protest activity of faculty and students, it used an obscure portion of the Immigration and Nationality Act in ways it had never been used before, it proposed deportations despite finding no evidence of terrorism or support for terrorism or any other violation of immigration law, and it proposed the deportations in spite of subordinates’ warnings that they would be subject to challenge for failing to comply with immigration statutes and violating the First Amendment.
The damage caused by this attack reverberates far and wide. The court cited as an example Professor Al-Ali, a lawful permanent resident and member of both the AAUP and MESA. “Professor Al-Ali credibly testified that news of Khalil and Öztürk’s arrests, in addition to the comment from President Trump that Khalil’s arrest would be one of ‘many,’ led her to alter international travel plans and to contact an immigration lawyer to track her travel abroad, to decline a public-facing leadership opportunity that might have more firmly associated her with pro-Palestine human rights advocacy, to cease her previous practice of signing open letters related to these issues, to forego specific research projects related to Palestine and funded research opportunities requiring travel, and to stop attending protests and assisting in negotiations between Brown University and its students as she had previously done, all out of fear of being targeted for her pro-Palestinian speech and association with such views.”
The court placed this persecution in the broader context of the Trump administration’s overall assault on free speech, explaining “the problem this President has with the First Amendment. Where things run off the rails for him is his fixation with ‘retribution.’ ‘I am your retribution,’ he thundered famously while on the campaign trail. Yet government retribution for speech (precisely what has happened here) is directly forbidden by the First Amendment.” The court highlighted how the Trump administration has available the vast resources of the federal government to suppress speech. “If the distinguished Homeland Security intelligence agency can be weaponized to squelch the free speech rights of a small, hapless group of non-citizens in our midst, so too can the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, and the audit divisions of the I.R.S. and the Social Security Administration be unconstitutionally weaponized against the President's ever growing list of ‘enemies’ or opponents he ‘hates’ notwithstanding that political persecution is anathema to our Constitution and everything for which America stands.”
One specific example of this growing authoritarianism decried by the court is the use of masked law enforcement officers. “ICE goes masked for a single reason—to terrorize Americans into quiescence. . . . To us, masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan. In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police.”
As in the recent Harvard decision, the administration’s claim that antisemitism justified its attempts to quash speech was again rejected, as the court found that the administration has “taken Executive Orders targeted at antisemitism, which already incorporated a definition of antisemitism encompassing protected speech, and implemented them in a way that systematically centered that latent focus on protected speech.”
The court rejected the administration’s argument that non-citizens do not have First Amendment rights. “This case—perhaps the most important ever to fall within the jurisdiction of this district court—squarely presents the issue whether non-citizens lawfully present here in United States actually have the same free speech rights as the rest of us. The Court answers this Constitutional question unequivocally ‘yes, they do.’”
Instead, the court unequivocally ruled that “the Plaintiffs have shown that Secretaries Noem and Rubio are engaged in a mode of enforcement leading to detaining, deporting, and revoking noncitizens’ visas solely on the basis of political speech, and with the intent of chilling such speech and that of others similarly situated. Such conduct is not only unconstitutional, but a thing virtually unknown to our constitutional tradition.”
While the court found that “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,” it also lamented “that our bastions of independent unbiased free speech—those entities we once thought unassailable—have proven all too often to have only Quaker [or fake] guns. Behold President Trump’s successes in limiting free speech—law firms cower, institutional leaders in higher education meekly appease the President, media outlets from huge conglomerates to small niche magazines mind the bottom line rather than the ethics of journalism.”
The remedy that will be fashioned by the court is complicated. First, as the court noted, “it will not do simply to order the Public Officials to cease and desist in the future.” Second, there are constitutional limitations on any court’s ability to direct the actions of the President’s administration.
The closing lines of the court’s decision express fear and perhaps hope.
I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected.
Is he correct?
The answer is a loud and clear “NO” from the AAUP and its members. We hope others stand up and answer no as well.