In a scathing rebuke of the Trump administration’s aggressive pursuit of non-US citizen, pro-Palestinian activists on American college campuses, a federal judge has described the former president as an “authoritarian” and accused his administration of an “unconstitutional conspiracy to pick off certain people.”
US District Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee, said on Thursday that he would issue an order aimed at protecting academics who challenged the arrest and deportation of pro-Palestinian scholars such as Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk. Young outlined an order he will issue in a week that seeks to prevent the Trump administration from changing the immigration status of any academics in the case he is handling who are themselves non-citizens.
The judge’s actions come in response to a lawsuit filed last year after immigration authorities arrested recent Columbia University graduate Khalil, the first target of Trump’s efforts to deport non-citizen students with pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel views. During a two-week trial in July, both citizen and non-citizen scholars testified about the climate of fear created by the arrests, while immigration officials admitted the government relied on dossiers compiled by the right-wing Canary Mission group and information from the far-right Zionist group Betar USA.
Young sharply criticised the Trump administration’s attempts to deport Khalil and others, calling the administration’s abridgment of First Amendment rights “appalling” and accusing top officials under Trump of adopting “a fearful approach to freedom” and a “view that defines the freedom here in the United States by who’s excluded.”
The judge compared the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement with the Fugitive Slave Act, an 1850 law that compelled law enforcement to return fugitive slaves to their “owners,” even when they were captured in free states. He said he would limit the reach of his forthcoming order to members of academic associations, including the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association, that challenged the administration’s actions.
While Young’s remedies do not guarantee the administration will not attempt to target non-citizens over their speech, the judge’s strong condemnation of the Trump administration’s tactics has been welcomed by civil liberties advocates. Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, which argued the case, said the administration’s continued targeting of foreign citizens based on their speech “reveals a disregard and even contempt for the rule of law.”
The White House spokesperson Anna Kelly dismissed the judge’s comments as “bizarre” and accused him of “engaging in left-wing activism against the democratically elected president of the United States.” However, Young’s ruling stands as a significant rebuke of the Trump administration’s efforts to suppress academic freedoms and free speech on college campuses.