A federal judge in Boston ruled yesterday that the Trump administration’s policy of targeting foreign students and faculty for deportation based on their pro-Palestinian advocacy is unconstitutional. The College Fix reports:
The plaintiffs, a coalition of academic and civil rights groups, hailed the decision as a crucial defense of constitutional principles.
But White House spokesperson Liz Huston described the ruling as “outrageous” and said an appeal is coming, asserting the ruling hampers national security, Reuters reported.
“Studying in the United States is a privilege that the Trump administration will not allow to foreign nationals who endanger America’s national security or imperil campus safety,” Huston said.
In his 161-page decision, Judge William Young found that the administration systematically violated the First Amendment rights of foreign students and engaged in a concerted effort to “chill” free speech on campuses.
Young ruled that Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio implemented Trump’s executive orders “in a viewpoint-discriminatory manner to suppress protected speech, violating the First Amendment.”
“…The Public Officials’ threats to continue detaining, deporting, and revoking visas based on political speech provide circumstantial evidence of viewpoint-discriminatory enforcement that has objectively chilled Plaintiffs’ speech.”
Judge Young’s decision described the case as “perhaps the most important ever to fall within the jurisdiction of this district court.”
Judge Young’s ruling was probably correct. But his decision also contained some extraneous statements that were irrelevant to his ruling. For example, he criticized the Trump administration’s use of masked ICE agents for arrests, even though that practice is lawful, regardless of whether it has bad optics. His ruling began with a post card from a member of the public warning him that Trump had “pardons and tanks. What do you have?”, to which he replied, “Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, we the people…have our magnificent constitution. Here’s how that works out in a specific case.” Beginning his opinion that way gave off an inflated sense of self-importance.
The New York Times says “the Trump administration’s strategy of scapegoating a few prominent leaders of pro-Palestinian demonstrations was a calculated move, designed to force like-minded academics from abroad into self-censorship.”
The ruling followed a ten-day bench trial in which “green card-holding professors at U.S. universities testified that the high-profile arrests of outspoken students, like former Columbia University pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk, made them fearful and stifled their speech.”
