Trump administration's crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus activists
faces federal trial
[July 07, 2025]
By MICHAEL CASEY
BOSTON (AP) — A federal bench trial begins Monday over a lawsuit that
challenges a Trump administration campaign of arresting and deporting
faculty and students who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations
and other political activities.
The lawsuit, filed by several university associations against President
Donald Trump and members of his administration, would be one of the
first to go to trial. Plaintiffs want U.S. District Judge William Young
to rule the policy violates the First Amendment and the Administrative
Procedure Act, a law governs the process by which federal agencies
develop and issue regulations.
“The policy’s effects have been swift. Noncitizen students and faculty
across the United States have been terrified into silence," the
plaintiffs wrote in their pretrial brief.
“Students and faculty are avoiding political protests, purging their
social media, and withdrawing from public engagement with groups
associated with pro-Palestinian viewpoints,” they wrote. “They’re
abstaining from certain public writing and scholarship they would
otherwise have pursued. They’re even self-censoring in the classroom.”
Several scholars are expected to testify how the policy and subsequent
arrests have prompted them to abandon their activism for Palestinian
human rights and criticizing Israeli government’s policies.
Since Trump took office, the U.S. government has used its immigration
enforcement powers to crack down on international students and scholars
at several American universities.
Trump and other officials have accused protesters and others of being
“pro-Hamas,” referring to the Palestinian militant group that attacked
Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Many protesters have said they were speaking out
against Israel’s actions in the war.
Plaintiffs single out several activists by name, including Palestinian
activist and Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, who was
released last month after spending 104 days in federal immigration
detention. Khalil has become a symbol of Trump ’s clampdown on campus
protests.
The lawsuit also references Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, who
was released in May from a Louisiana immigration detention. She spent
six weeks in detention after she was arrested walking on the street of a
Boston suburb. She claims she was illegally detained following an op-ed
she co-wrote last year that criticized the school’s response to Israel’s
war in Gaza.
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A crowd gathers in Foley Square, outside the Manhattan federal
court, in support of Mahmoud Khalil, March 12, 2025, in New York.
(AP Photo/Stefan Jeremiah, File)
The plaintiffs also accuse the Trump administration of supplying
names to universities who they wanted to target, launching a social
media surveillance program and used Trump’s own words in which he
said after Khalil’s arrest that his was the “first arrest of many to
come.”
The government argued in court documents that the plaintiffs are
bringing a First Amendment challenge to a policy “of their own
creation.”
“They do not try to locate this program in any statute, regulation,
rule, or directive. They do not allege that it is written down
anywhere. And they do not even try to identify its specific terms
and substance,” the government argues. “That is all unsurprising,
because no such policy exists.”
They argue the plaintiffs case also rest on a “misunderstanding of
the First Amendment, ”which under binding Supreme Court precedent
applies differently in the immigration context than it otherwise
does domestically."
But plaintiffs counter that evidence at the trial will show the
Trump administration has implemented the policy a variety of ways,
including issuing formal guidance on revoking visas and green cards
and establishing a process for identifying those involved in
pro-Palestinian protests.
"Defendants have described their policy, defended it, and taken
political credit for it," plaintiffs wrote. “It is only now that the
policy has been challenged that they say, incredibly, that the
policy does not actually exist. But the evidence at trial will show
that the policy’s existence is beyond cavil.”
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