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A federal judge ruled Tuesday that the Trump administration unconstitutionally violated the free speech rights of pro-Palestinian protesters and academics — saying in a blistering 161-page order that the actions had a chilling effect on college campuses nationwide.
U.S. District Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee who was nominated to the federal bench in Boston more than 40 years ago, did not mince his words in his decision. He excoriated the Trump administration, saying senior government officials seized on prominent pro-Palestinian protesters and academics, including Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk, in an illegal effort to quash free speech and suppress additional protests from taking place at campuses across the country.
“No one’s freedom of speech is unlimited, of course, but these limits are the same for both citizens and non-citizens alike,” Young said.
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“Having carefully considered the entirety of the record, this Court finds by clear and convincing evidence that the Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, together with the subordinate officials and agents of each of them, deliberately and with purposeful aforethought, did so concert their actions and those of their two departments intentionally to chill the rights to freedom of speech and peacefully to assemble of the non-citizen plaintiff members of the plaintiff associations,” Young said.
“It was never the Secretaries’ immediate intention to deport all pro-Palestinian non-citizens for that obvious First Amendment violation, that could have raised a major outcry,” Young said.
“Rather, the intent of the Secretaries was more insidious … to target a few for speaking out and then use the full rigor of the Immigration and Nationality Act (in ways it had never been used before) to have them publicly deported with the goal of tamping down pro-Palestinian student protests and terrorizing similarly situated non-citizen (and other) pro-Palestinians into silence because their views were unwelcome.”
The case was litigated during a two-week trial in July.
Young went on to lambaste Trump as a “bully,” and one who fundamentally misunderstands the country he serves as commander-in-chief; and whom he said in his decision is fixated on “hollow bragging” and “retribution,” including, primarily, on issues of speech.
“Yet government retribution for speech (precisely what has happened here) is directly forbidden by the First Amendment,” Young said.
The decision from Young comes after the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association, both of whom represented pro-Palestinian protesters and academics, sued the Trump administration earlier this year over their efforts to crack down on free speech protections.
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Young sided with the groups who argued the case on behalf of university faculty, ruling that the Trump administration’s actions violated the First Amendment, as well as his oath to “preserve, protect and defend the constitution” as the commander-in-chief.
Trump’s “palpable misunderstanding that the government simply cannot seek retribution for speech he disdains poses a great threat to Americans’ freedom of speech,” he added. “It is at this juncture that the judiciary has robustly rebuffed the president and his administration.”
“I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected,” Young said, finally. “Is he correct?”
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