Over the past several months, the AAUP has repeatedly challenged the Trump administration’s efforts to repress political speech, condition university funding on ideological compliance, and dismantle protections for higher education workers. This litigation has been supported by the AAUP Foundation and pursued in collaboration with the AFT, the American Civil Liberties Union, Democracy Forward, and the Knight First Amendment Institute. An overview of the eight cases in which the AAUP is a plaintiff is available at https://www.aaup.org/litigation.
On October 3, the AAUP joined a broad coalition of labor unions, religious organizations, and advocacy groups in challenging the Trump administration’s imposition of a $100,000 fee on H-1B visa petitions. The H-1B visa program is a critical pathway to hiring educators and health-care workers—both in high demand in the United States—who together make up 10 percent of all H-1B workers. The new restrictions disrupt teaching, research, and grant-funded projects, undermining the mission of higher education to produce knowledge and innovation for the common good. Further, the executive order transformed the H1-B visa process into one of extortion: Institutions either pay exorbitant fees or lose talented scholars and researchers. The AAUP and its allies argued that this policy violates the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and exceeds the president’s authority under the statutes authorizing the visa program. After our coalition filed this lawsuit, US Citizenship and Immigration Services retracted some of the most extreme provisions of the visa policy, clarifying that the new fee applies only to prospective, not to current, visa holders. On December 18, our coalition partners filed two motions, one asking the court to block enforcement of the $100,000 fee while the case proceeds, and another certifying a nationwide class of US employers that were harmed by the fee to ensure that relief applies widely and uniformly.
On November 14, a federal court in the Northern District of California granted a preliminary injunction against the Trump administration’s campaign to coerce the University of California into ideological conformity—a move that the court recognized as a grave threat to academic freedom and free speech. The plaintiffs, led by the AAUP and including a broad coalition of faculty members, staff, students, and labor unions, challenged the Trump administration’s cancellation of nearly $600 million in federal research grants to the University of California, Los Angeles, and its demand that UCLA adopt the administration’s positions on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; gender identity; and campus protests. The court agreed, noting that “plaintiffs’ harm is already very real. With every day that passes, UCLA continues to be denied the chance to win new grants, ratchetting up Defendants’ pressure campaign. . . . [UC faculty] describe how they have stopped teaching or researching topics they are afraid are too ‘left’ or ‘woke,’ in order to avoid triggering further funding cancellations by Defendants.” Accordingly, the court ordered a preliminary injunction that reinstated funding to the UC system and barred the Trump administration from restricting, withholding, or otherwise conditioning funds on compliance with its ideological agenda. While the injunction does not yet resolve the entire case, it blocks the most coercive elements of the administration’s playbook as the case proceeds on the merits.
As reported previously in Academe, a federal court issued a landmark ruling in September that the Trump administration's policy of arresting, detaining, and deporting noncitizen students and faculty members for their pro-Palestinian advocacy violates the First Amendment. On January 22, 2026, Judge William Young issued an order curbing the administration's ability to deport noncitizen members of the AAUP and the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), plaintiffs in the case. The order formally declares the policy unlawful under the First Amendment and the APA and provides that AAUP and MESA members who contest changes to their immigration status may benefit from a presumption that such actions were taken in retaliation for constitutionally protected speech.