Rare trial to begin in challenge to Trump-backed deportation of pro-Palestinian campus activists
A two-week non-jury trial in the professors' case scheduled to kick off on Monday in Boston marks a rarity in the hundreds of lawsuits that have been filed nationally challenging Republican President Donald Trump's efforts to carry out mass deportations, slash spending and reshape the federal government.
In many of those cases, judges have issued quick rulings early on in the proceedings without any witnesses being called to testify. Now US district judge William Young, in keeping with his long-standing practice, instead ordered a trial in the professors' case, saying it was the 'best way to get at truth'.
The lawsuit was filed in March after immigration authorities arrested recent Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, the first target of Trump's effort to deport non-citizen students with pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel views.
Since then, the administration has cancelled the visas of hundreds of other students and scholars and ordered the arrest of some, including Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student taken into custody by masked and plainclothes agents after co-writing an opinion piece criticising her school's response to Israel's war in Gaza.
In their cases and others, judges have ordered the release of students detained by immigration authorities after they argued the administration retaliated against them for their pro-Palestinian advocacy in violation of the free speech guarantees of the US Constitution's First Amendment.
Their arrests form the basis of the case before Young, which was filed by the American Association of University Professors and its chapters at Harvard, Rutgers and New York University, and the Middle East Studies Association.
They allege the state department and department of homeland security adopted a policy of revoking visas for non-citizen students and faculty members who engaged in pro-Palestinian advocacy and arresting, detaining and deporting them.
That policy, they say, was adopted after Trump signed executive orders in January directing the agencies to protect Americans from non-citizens who 'espouse hateful ideology' and to 'vigorously' combat anti-Semitism.
Secretary of state Marco Rubio in late March said he had revoked more than 300 visas and warned that the Trump administration was looking every day for 'these lunatics'.
The goal, the plaintiffs say, has been to suppress the types of protests that have roiled college campuses after Israel launched its war in Gaza after the Hamas attack of October 7 2023 on Israel.
Trump administration officials have frequently spoken about the efforts to target student protesters for visa revocations. Yet in court, the administration has defended itself by arguing the plaintiffs are challenging a deportation policy that does not exist and cannot point to any statute, rule, regulation or directive codifying it.
'We don't deport people based on ideology,' homeland security department spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said.
Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem 'has made it clear that anyone who thinks they can come to America and hide behind the First Amendment to advocate anti-American and anti-Semitic violence and terrorism — think again. You are not welcome here,' McLaughlin said.
The trial will determine whether the administration has violated the plaintiffs' First Amendment free speech rights. If Young concludes it has, he will determine a remedy in a second phase of the case.
Young has described the lawsuit as 'an important free speech case' and said as alleged in the plaintiffs' complaint, 'it is hard to imagine a policy more focused on intimidating its targets from practising protected political speech'.
The case is the second Trump-era legal challenge so far that has gone to trial before Young, an 84-year-old appointee of Republican former president Ronald Reagan.
While other Trump-era cases have been resolved through motions and arguments in court, the veteran jurist has long espoused the value of trials and in a recent order lamented the 'virtual abandonment by the federal judiciary of any sense that its fact-finding processes are exceptional'.
Young last month, after another non-jury trial, delivered civil rights advocates and Democratic-led states a win by ordering the reinstatement of hundreds of National Institutes of Health research grants unlawfully terminated because of their perceived promotion of diversity, equity and inclusion.
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