A federal judge Thursday decried what he said were “breathtaking” constitutional violations by senior Trump administration officials and called the president an “authoritarian” who expects everyone in the executive branch to “toe the line absolutely.”
In remarks laced with outrage and disbelief, U.S. District Judge William Young said Donald Trump and top officials have a “fearful approach” to freedom of speech that would seek to “exclude from participation everyone who doesn’t agree with them.”
Young, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan, leveled the searing critique during a hearing in Boston to determine the appropriate remedies for the administration’s detentions of pro-Palestinian students last year. The judge had ruled in September that senior administration officials engaged in an illegal effortto arrest and deport noncitizen students based on their activism.
On Thursday, he again denounced the administration’s conduct in unusually stark terms. “Talking straight here,” he said. “The big problem in this case is that the cabinet secretaries and ostensibly, the president of the United States, are not honoring the First Amendment.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio engaged in an “unconstitutional conspiracy” to deprive people of their rights, Young said. “The secretary of state,” he noted, his voice full of incredulity, “the senior cabinet officer in our history involved in this.”
Spokespersons for the White House, Noem and Rubio did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, last year called Young a “craven” judge who was “smearing and demonizing federal law enforcement.”
The government actions at the core of the case date to early March, when the Trump administration launched a campaign to detain and deport noncitizen students at U.S. universities who had been active in opposing Israel’s war in Gaza. Though not accused of any crime, those arrested spent weeks confined in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities, at times hundreds of miles from where they lived, before being released on bail.
The plaintiffs in the case are the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association. The groups of scholars accused the administration of having an unconstitutional policy of deporting people based on their political views, a policy intended to chill the free-speech rights of their members.
The trial last summer focused on the targeting of five noncitizen students and scholars: Mahmoud Khalil, Yunseo Chung and Mohsen Mahdawi, who were students at Columbia University; Rumeysa Ozturk, a graduate student at Tufts University; and Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral scholar at Georgetown University.
All were arrested except Chung, who obtained a restraining order before ICE could find her. The other four were released on the orders of federal judges, but the Trump administration is still trying to deport them. On Thursday, an appellate court in Philadelphia overturned a lower-court ruling in Khalil’s case on jurisdictional grounds, raising the possibility that he could be rearrested.
The president and other officials hailed last year’s detentions as part of a fight against antisemitism, alleging without presenting evidence that the targeted students promoted violence or were pro-Hamas.
While Young condemned the administration’s actions Thursday, he indicated that he would not grant the sweeping relief proposed by the plaintiffs, who had sought an injunction barring such conduct and a variety of monitoring and reporting requirements.
Young said he expected to issue a more narrowly tailored order next Thursday, one that would protect the noncitizen members of the plaintiff groups from changes to their immigration status except in certain defined circumstances.
The 2025 trial revealed the machinery behind the Trump administration’s campus crackdown. Senior administration officials directed personnel at DHS who normally analyze transnational criminal networks to instead produce reports on students involved in pro-Palestinian protests, one official testified.
The analysts relied heavily on thousands of profiles generated by Canary Mission, an opaque pro-Israel group that says it documents individuals who “promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews” on college campuses.
Working largely from Canary Mission’s list, Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of ICE, generated between 100 and 200 reports on student protesters, the official testified.
DHS then referred dozens of such reports to the State Department, recommending that it revoke the visas and green cards of those students and scholars, paving the way for their removal. Within weeks, some were arrested by masked agents in plainclothes and flown to detention facilities in Louisiana and Texas.
Officials and agents from Homeland Security Investigations testified that they had never been asked to compile reports on student protesters before 2025, nor to arrest noncitizen students because their immigration status had changed.
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