A federal judge has dealt the Trump administration a significant legal blow, ruling that the administration’s effort to cancel visas and deport noncitizen college students for their pro-Palestinian advocacy and criticism of Israel is unconstitutional. District Judge Noel Wise said in her ruling on Friday that the two provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act that the administration cited to initiate deportation proceedings violated the First Amendment. It is not the government’s to take,” she wrote.
The ruling came in a case brought by The Stanford Daily, Stanford University's student newspaper, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, which argued the administration used the provisions to target noncitizen students for deportation based on protected speech, including writing op-eds and attending protests. It alleged that the administration’s actions had suppressed the speech of noncitizen students who feared that expressing their views could lead to them being targeted for deportation.
Amid a wider immigration crackdown, the Trump administration started revoking visas and pursuing deportation proceedings against noncitizen students involved in campus protests and political activism last year. The efforts garnered increased attention following the arrests of Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk. Newsweek has contacted the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, and the White House for comment via emails sent outside regular business hours.
Wise’s ruling echoed a similar decision issued by U.S. District Judge William Young in Boston last year. Young, who was appointed by a Republican president, ruled in a case brought by academic groups that the Trump administration had violated the Constitution when it targeted foreign students for deportation solely for their pro-Palestinian activism and that the policy had chilled political speech.
The lawsuit agreed that Secretary of State Marco Rubio used two provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act to target noncitizens for expressing views. One of the provisions allows Rubio to initiate deportation proceedings against a noncitizen if he personally determines the speech “compromises a compelling foreign policy interest,” while another allows him to revoke the visa of any noncitizen at his discretion. Attorneys for the student newspaper argued that the provisions violate the U.S.
Constitution’s First and Fifth Amendments when applied to constitutionally protected speech. Wise, an appointee of former Democratic president Joe Biden, agreed. In her ruling, she also wrote that free speech is evidence of a country’s strength.
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