By
Jacob Rosen,
Jacob Rosen
Justice Department Reporter
Jake Rosen is a reporter covering the Department of Justice. He was previously a campaign digital reporter covering President Trump’s 2024 campaign and also served as an associate producer for “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.”
September 30, 2025 / 2:32 PM EDT
/ CBS News
Washington — A federal judge in Massachusetts ruled Tuesday that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio violated the First Amendment by targeting pro-Palestinian students for deportation in order to strike fear into international students and curb lawful speech.
In a 161-page decision, U.S. District Judge William Young delivered a blistering assessment of the Trump administration’s efforts to pursue international students who expressed pro-Palestinian views on college campuses, which he said was constitutionally protected speech.
The judge, appointed by former President Ronald Reagan, was unsparing not only in his views of Noem and Rubio’s actions, but also of President Trump, who he said approves of “truly scandalous and unconstitutional suppression of free speech” on the part of two senior administration officials.
“The president’s palpable misunderstanding that the government simply cannot seek retribution for speech he disdains poses a great threat to Americans’ freedom of speech,” he wrote.
Of Noem and Rubio, as well as other administration officials, Young wrote that they “acted in concert to misuse the sweeping powers of their respective offices to target noncitizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their First Amendment protected political speech,” and did so through targeted deportation proceedings aimed at pro-Palestinian student activists across the country, which “continues unconstitutionally to chill freedom of speech to this day.”
The judge issued his decision after holding a nine-day trial that examined whether the administration had violated the free speech rights of academic associations that sued the Trump administration for arrests, detentions and deportations of foreign students and faculty who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
Young praised the witnesses who testified on behalf of the government, saying of them that they were “decent, credible, dedicated nonpartisan professionals. True patriots who, in order to do their duty, have been weaponized by their highest superiors to reach foregone conclusions for most ignoble ends.”
But he accused Rubio and Noem of acting with “invidious” intent: “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.”
Young further chastised the Trump administration for deploying masked agents to detain students like Tufts University doctoral student and Turkish native Rumeysa Ozturk, who was taken into custody by masked, plainclothes immigration authorities in March and spent more than a month and a half in federal immigration custody before lawyers secured her release from detention.
“This Court has listened carefully to the reasons given by Öztürk’s captors for masking-up and has heard the same reasons advanced by the defendant Todd Lyons, Acting Director of ICE. It rejects this testimony as disingenuous, squalid and dishonorable. ICE goes masked for a single reason — to terrorize Americans into quiescence,” Young wrote. “To us, masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan. In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police.”
The judge also responded to a threat sent to his chambers, putting the anonymous threat, and his response, at the top of the opinion — an unusual, rare move.
“Trump has pardons and tanks … what do you have?” says the post card, dated June 19 and written by hand. Young responds that “Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, We the People of the United States — you and me — have our magnificent Constitution,” he writes, before delivering his opinion in the case. At the end of his opinion, Young again wrote to the person who sent the anonymous threat.
“I hope you found this helpful. Thanks for writing. It shows you care. You should,” Young wrote.
The judge then invited the anonymous sender to visit the court to watch a proceeding.
While Young concluded that Noem and Rubio unconstitutionally chilled the free speech rights of pro-Palestinian students by targeting them for deportation, he ended his decision with a searing rebuke of Mr. Trump and the changes to the executive branch he has ushered in since returning to the White House in January.
Noem has not yet responded to a request for comment, and Rubio has also not yet responded to a request for comment.
Young accused the president of “hollow bragging” and said he “ignores everything” from the Constitution to civil laws to regulations, only to continue “bullying on.”
Given that Mr. Trump is immune from prosecution, the judge said the president is prepared to deploy “all the resources of the nation against obstruction.”
“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,” Young wrote.
In July, Paramount, the parent company of CBS News, settled a lawsuit brought by Mr. Trump over a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris for $16 million.
The judge said Mr. Trump “meets dissent from his orders in those other two branches by demonizing and disparaging the speakers, sometimes descending to personal vitriol,” calling those he dislikes “traitors.”
But Young praises the judiciary for rebuffing the Trump administration in its efforts to infringe on the First Amendment rights of those he dislikes, from law firms who challenged executive orders targeting them, to universities like Harvard that have been punished by the administration to news outlets like the Associated Press.
“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 writes in closing. “Is he correct?”
Young was appointed by Reagan to the federal bench in 1985 and called the case involving the administration’s efforts to punish pro-Palestinian activists “perhaps the most important” to fall within the jurisdiction of the district court in Massachusetts.
Jake Rosen is a reporter covering the Department of Justice. He was previously a campaign digital reporter covering President Trump’s 2024 campaign and also served as an associate producer for “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.”
The post Judge finds Trump admin. unconstitutionally targeted pro-Palestinian students appeared first on CBS News.
