Judge Shields Academic Plaintiffs From Immigration Retaliation in First Amendment Case Against Trump Administration

On Thursday, a federal judge in Boston gave a group of noncitizen academics a new kind of protection: if the government alters their immigration status, they can go to court and ask for relief, and the court will presume the change was retaliation for their part in a lawsuit.

The order comes from U.S. District Judge William Young, who presided over a trial last year in a case brought by two groups, the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association. They allege that U.S. policy singles out noncitizens for detention or deportation because of pro-Palestinian activism on college campuses. After that trial, Young ruled that the Trump administration had violated the Constitution by targeting non-citizens for deportation solely for supporting Palestinians and criticizing Israel. On Thursday he described his new order as a "remedial sanction" meant to shield certain noncitizen members of the plaintiff groups from retribution for exercising their constitutional rights.

The protection has conditions. A noncitizen who challenges a change in status must show membership in either group between March 25, 2025, and Sept. 30, 2025. They must also show that their immigration status had not expired and that they committed no crime after Sept. 30, 2025. With that proof, Young wrote, it will be presumed that the change was retribution for exercising First Amendment rights during the case. The Associated Press reported that it knows of no members of either group whose status has changed because of involvement in the lawsuit. A Department of Homeland Security spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

At a hearing earlier this month, Young was pointed about the officials involved. He said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and their agents had engaged in an "unconstitutional conspiracy" to limit the plaintiffs' speech, chilling their rights through attempts to "pick off certain people." He said the problem was that cabinet secretaries and, ostensibly, the president were not honoring the First Amendment, adding that the government did not seem to understand what it is. Young, an appointee of the late Republican President Ronald Reagan, also asked how the government's highest officials could so infringe on the rights of people lawfully in the country. The record, he said, convinced him that those officials, the president included, have a fearful view of freedom.

The trial record showed the scale of the effort. Government witnesses acknowledged that the campaign targeted more than 5,000 pro-Palestinian protesters. Witnesses for the plaintiffs described how it spread fear among academics and led some to stop their activism.

Individual cases helped drive the lawsuit. One is that of Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student. Earlier this month, a three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court decision that had released Khalil from immigration detention. The panel did not decide whether the effort to remove him over his campus activism and criticism of Israel was unconstitutional. Instead, by a 2-1 vote, it held that a federal judge in New Jersey lacked jurisdiction at this stage, because federal law requires the case to move through the immigration courts first. The ruling was a major win for the administration's campaign, though it was not immediately clear whether the government would seek to detain Khalil, a legal permanent resident, again while his challenges continue.

Another was Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University student arrested on a suburban Boston street and held for six weeks before her release in May. She said she was illegally detained after co-writing an op-ed last year that criticized her school's response to Israel's war in Gaza.

Ramya Krishnan, a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute, which argued for relief in court, said the administration's efforts to deport pro-Palestinian advocates have "spread terror" in campus communities. Students and scholars, she said, should not have to fear that ICE agents could seize them from their homes for political expression, and she said the judgment makes clear the intimidation campaign must end.

What to watch next is whether the administration challenges the presumption of retaliation, and how the Third Circuit's jurisdictional reasoning in Khalil's case shapes other detention and deportation fights.