In a blistering opinion on Tuesday, Federal District Judge William Young, an appointee of former President Ronald Reagan, said Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem misused their powers in the deportation campaign.
“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 … the freedom of speech that is their right,” Young wrote.
“Moreover, the effect of these targeted deportation proceedings continues unconstitutionally to chill freedom of speech to this day.”
The ruling represents a major rebuke to the Trump administration’s efforts to penalise non-citizens who participated in campus activism against the war on Gaza last year.
Rubio has stated that he revoked the visas of hundreds of students – including legal permanent residents – over their Palestine activism.
The case was brought forward by the American Association of University Professors, which has been pushing back on Trump’s campaign to reshape higher education to align more with his right-wing worldview.
During the proceedings, federal officials acknowledged relying on Canary Mission – a shadowy doxxing website that critics describe as a hate group – to identify foreign students for removal.
Young concluded that Trump’s aides cracked down on the students in order to make an example out of them, “terrorizing similarly situated non-citizen (and other) pro-Palestinians into silence”.
Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil was one of the first students to be targeted. He was detained in an immigration facility for three months and missed the birth of his first son before a judge ordered his release.
In another high-profile case, Turkish Tufts University scholar Rumeysa Ozturk was nabbed by masked federal agents and spent weeks in jail for co-authoring an op-ed in her school’s newspaper.
The article called on the university administration to uphold the student senate’s resolutions, including a call for divesting from companies complicit in Israeli human right abuses.
A federal court ordered federal authorities to release Ozturk in May. But she, Khalil and others continue to face deportation proceedings.
It is not immediately clear how Tuesday’s ruling will affect those cases individually.
To deport the activists, Rubio has been invoking a seldom-used provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act on the basis that the students’ presence has “adverse” effects on American foreign policy.
The Trump administration has been arguing that foreign students and non-citizens in general have minimal rights and could be removed for abusing the privileges of being in the US.
It has accused the students – without providing evidence – of supporting “terrorism”, promoting anti-Semitism and spreading Hamas propaganda.
While Judge Young agreed that non-citizens are guests, he stressed that they have constitutional protections.
“How we treat our guests is a question of constitutional scope, because who we are as a people and as a nation is an important part of how we must interpret the fundamental laws that constrain us,” he wrote.
“We are not, and we must not become, a nation that imprisons and deports people because we are afraid of what they have to tell us.”
The judge also rejected equating criticism of Israel with support for “terrorism”.
“If ‘terrorist’ is interpreted to mean ‘pro-Palestine’ or ‘anti-Israel,’ and ‘support’ encompasses pure political speech, then core free speech rights have been imperiled,” he said.
Young added it is not clear whether Trump directed the deportation campaign, but he noted that the US president celebrated and “wholeheartedly supported it”.
