A new lawsuit filed on Wednesday by a free speech watchdog takes aim at the key legal foundations the Trump administration has relied on to arrest and try to deport foreign students over their criticism of the Israeli government.
The challenge, filed in California, goes further than other lawsuits that have targeted the student arrests. The new suit focuses on a section of immigration law that allows the secretary of state to determine that a noncitizen poses a threat to the country’s foreign policy and can be removed from the country for that reason. It argues that it is unconstitutional to invoke the provisions for speech and other activities protected by the First Amendment.
Lawyers from the free speech group, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, brought the lawsuit on behalf of the student newspaper at Stanford University, the Stanford Daily, arguing that several of its staff members have been forced to self-censor or quit the paper out of fear that the government could retaliate for what it publishes.
The lawsuit says that the newspaper, which is open to all students and has more than 200 members, has weathered resignations and withdrawn stories by noncitizens who were concerned that publishing content about Israel or the conditions in Gaza could leave them vulnerable to deportation.
The climate of fear the lawsuit cites at Stanford follows a spate of arrests earlier this year, when the Trump administration began targeting prominent student activists in March, including Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk, over their activism in speaking out against the Israeli government and the mounting death toll in Gaza.
“They are going after lawfully present noncitizens for bedrock speech, like authoring an op-ed and going to protest,” said Conor Fitzpatrick, the supervising senior attorney at the foundation. “And unless you have a blue passport with an eagle on it that says United States of America, they think they can throw you out of the country for it.”
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