A federal judge in Boston on Monday will hear opening statements in a trial expected to cut to the heart of several of the most divisive issues in U.S. politics, including President Trump, Israel and free speech on college campuses.
The case, filed by a pair of academic associations in March, has become the foremost challenge to the Trump administration’s aggressive posture toward foreign students who espoused pro-Palestinian views. It contends that the government’s targeting of prominent noncitizen academics who have criticized Israel — such as Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi of Columbia University and Rumeysa Ozturk of Tufts — has already partially succeeded in chilling political speech across the country, and should be categorically stopped on First Amendment grounds.
All of those academics, who are either legal permanent residents or in the United States on student visas, have successfully fought for and obtained their release even as their immigration cases continue to wend through the courts.
But lawyers for the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, who are representing the associations, will argue at trial this week that the arrests were part of an official policy that could just as easily be turned on other groups that clash with the Trump administration.
While the Supreme Court has affirmed in at least one major case that foreign nationals living in the United States are generally entitled to First Amendment rights, constitutional law experts have cautioned that there are few obvious legal parallels in American history.
In its filings, the government has argued that pro-Palestinian demonstrations are an expression of support for Hamas, which the American government considers a terrorist organization. It has relied on Cold War-era precedents in which the Supreme Court upheld the government’s power to deny entry to people over their past membership in the Communist Party.
Deciding whether the Trump administration overstepped will now fall to Judge William G. Young of Federal District Court in Massachusetts. A lifelong believer in the power of trials to clear up thorny legal questions, Judge Young has scheduled a nine-day bench trial — a trial without a jury — to explore whether the arrests and planned deportations fall within the president’s authority or amount to a grave abuse of power.
In June, Judge Young blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to cancel science grants that funded research into diversity-related topics like health disparities in Black and L.G.B.T.Q. communities. He rejected the cuts as racial discrimination unlike anything he had seen from the government in his 40 years on the federal bench.
In this case, through witnesses and evidence, lawyers from the Knight Institute will work to establish that the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security collaborated to surveil social media and other writings for content that could be used as justification for revoking visas and green cards in order to launch deportations.
“It is totally antithetical to the First Amendment to allow the government to use immigration law as a cudgel in this way,” said Ramya Krishnan, a senior staff attorney at the Knight Institute who will appear in court on Monday. “If the First Amendment means anything, it means the government can’t lock you up because it doesn’t like what you have to say.”
As much as the issues that will arise at trial seem inextricably linked to the fraught politics of the present, both sides acknowledge that they are deeply rooted in American history.
In trial briefs, lawyers from both the Knight Institute and the government have looked to the height of the Cold War for cues, noting vague similarities to the way the Trump administration has sought to remove people based on a finding that their speech threatened the “national interest.”
The government has denied that any blanket policy toward pro-Palestinian activists exists. But it has raised several Supreme Court decisions focused on people accused of Communist or anarchist sympathies, in which it found First Amendment protections did not apply. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly said the government’s goal is to revoke the visas of “Hamas supporters in America.”
“The court has already rejected a First Amendment challenge to a governmental effort to deport Communists for being Communists — i.e., an effort to prioritize immigration enforcement to combat a given political viewpoint,” the Justice Department wrote in one of its filings. “There is no constitutional difference to an effort to expel Hamas supporters.”
Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight Institute, said the practices employed by the Trump administration evoked the widespread abuse of screening under the McCarran-Walter Act, long before social media was involved.
He likened the current climate to the 1950s and 1960s, when the United States turned away cultural icons such as Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda and Doris Lessing, among others, over their association with Communism.
“Now, instead of a handful of people being denied visas because they wrote books that the government misinterprets as sympathetic to Communism,” Mr. Jaffer said, “we have every consular officer turned into a kind of censor, reviewing everybody’s social media posts for any evidence of not just pro-Palestinian sentiment, but hostility to American values — whatever that means.”
Over the course of the trial, the groups suing will call as witnesses a mix of noncitizen students and faculty members and U.S. citizens, including a Columbia University professor who worked alongside Mr. Khalil and Mr. Mahdawi.
Most are members of the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association, the two organizations behind the lawsuit, and will testify about their experience feeling pressure to censor themselves or witnessing a loss of engagement from their colleagues.
Taken together, their testimony is expected to describe an intellectually impoverished academic environment, in which students and faculty members alike have begun avoiding topics out of step with conservative ideology because of fear of retribution, according to a pretrial brief.
While the lawsuit is national in scope, and was filed before the Supreme Court limited lower courts’ ability to issue nationwide injunctions, the outcome could still be sweeping.
Even if the judge were to limit his ruling to the groups involved in the lawsuit, both are national faculty-based associations, with tens of thousands of members between them across more than 500 colleges and universities.
Above all, lawyers will work to impress upon the judge this week that any crackdown on speech is a slippery slope, and that the same tactics that unfolded this year could just as soon be applied to deport other groups based on support for other causes.
“The same argument that they’re making could as easily be made with respect to pro-Greenland advocacy or pro-Canada advocacy or pro-Ukraine advocacy,” Mr. Jaffer said.
“Some of the students that they have targeted are green-card holders, and they have also said repeatedly that they intend to go after naturalized citizens next,” he added. “So nobody should feel secure just because they’re targeting foreign students and nobody else.”
Zach Montague is a Times reporter covering the federal courts, including the legal disputes over the Trump administration’s agenda.
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