Photo by: Andrea Renault/STAR MAX/IPx 2024 4/20/24
A federal judge issued a scathing rebuke to President Donald Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian student protesters, finding that his administration had illegally targeted immigrant students for deportation in order to “strike fear” into protesters exercising their First Amendment rights, expressly ruling that non-citizens lawfully present in the U.S. “have the same free speech rights” as citizens.
On Tuesday, Judge William G. Young with the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts issued a 161-page opinion that was “the most scathing legal rebuke of the Trump era,” as Politico senior legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney phrased it.
The opinion addressed the detention and deportation of students who had been attending college in the U.S. on student visas, including Mahmoud Khalil, who organized pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, and Rümeysa Öztürk, who was arrested by masked DHS agents after co-authoring an op-ed criticizing Tufts University’s response to the Israel-Gaza war and resolutions passed by student groups, noting that neither had a criminal history. Young went through these and other cases involving non-citizen student protesters in detail, finding the Trump administration’s justifications of stamping out anti-Semitism on college campuses to be insufficient, noting that there was often “no direct connection” between the anti-Semitic activities the administration was claiming and the actual words or actions of these specific students.
In an unusual move, Young bookended his opinion with a message to someone who sent his court an anonymous postcard dated June 19 with a threat that read, “TRUMP HAS PARDONS AND TANKS…WHAT DO YOU HAVE?”
“Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous,” Young wrote at the beginning of the opinion. “Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, We the People of the United States — you and me — have our magnificent Constitution. Here’s how that works out in a specific case –”
The judge added another message to the postcard writer at the very end, writing:
I hope you found this helpful. Thanks for writing. It shows you care. You should.
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Sincerely & respectfully,
Bill YoungP.S. The next time you’re in Boston [the postmark on the card is from the Philadelphia area] stop in at the Courthouse and watch your fellow citizens, sitting as jurors, reach out for justice. It is here, and in courthouses just like this one, both state and federal, spread throughout our land that our Constitution is most vibrantly alive, for it is well said that “Where a jury sits, there burns the lamp of liberty.”
The opinion then began by quoting the First Amendment in full and ruling in clear terms that non-citizens lawfully present in the U.S. do in fact “have the same free speech rights” as citizens (citations omitted):
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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.” “No law” means “no law.” The First Amendment does not draw President Trump’s invidious distinction and it is not to be found in our history or jurisprudence. No one’s freedom of speech is unlimited, of course, but these limits are the same for both citizens and non-citizens alike.
Cheney and AllRise News editor-in-chief Adam Klasfeld both highlighted another unusual aspect of this opinion — a 12 page section that excoriates Trump as “an ignorant bully, braggart and threat to free speech and the republic writ-large,” as Cheney put it.
Wrote Young about Trump’s efforts to intimidate American institutions into compliance (citations omitted):
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Small wonder then that our bastions of independent unbiased free speech – those entities we once thought unassailable — have proven all too often to have only Quaker 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.
…and he keeps bullying on.
Whether it’s social media, print, or television, President Trump is the master communicator of our time. His speech
dominates today’s American idiom. Indeed, it may be said to define it. It is triumphal, transactional, imperative,
bellicose, and coarse. It seeks to persuade –- not through marshaling data driven evidence, science, or moral suasion, but through power.Advertisement
