Judge Warns Trump Administration Against Retaliating Against Plaintiffs' Immigration Status in Speech Case

On Thursday in Boston, U.S. District Judge William Young issued an order protecting a group of noncitizen academics from a specific fear: that joining a lawsuit against the Trump administration could cost them their immigration status. Under the ruling, plaintiffs whose status is changed as retribution for taking part in the case can ask the court for relief.

The lawsuit was brought by two groups, the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association. It alleges that U.S. policy singles out noncitizens for detention or deportation because of pro-Palestinian activism on college campuses. Young heard the case at trial last year and ruled that the administration violated the Constitution when it targeted non-U.S. citizens for deportation solely for supporting Palestinians and criticizing Israel. On Thursday he described his new order as a remedial sanction meant to protect certain noncitizen members of the plaintiff groups from retribution for exercising their constitutional rights.

The order sets conditions. A noncitizen who challenges a change in immigration status must prove membership in AAUP or MESA at some point between March 25, 2025, and Sept. 30, 2025. The person must also show that their immigration status had not expired and that they committed no crime after Sept. 30, 2025. Once that is shown, Young wrote, it will be presumed that the change in status is retribution for exercising First Amendment rights during the case. The Associated Press, the source of this reporting, said it is not aware of any members of these groups whose status has changed because they are part of the lawsuit. A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.

Young, an appointee of the late Republican President Ronald Reagan, was blunt at a hearing earlier this month. 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, creating a chilling effect through attempts to pick off certain people. He said the cabinet secretaries, and ostensibly the president, are not honoring the First Amendment, and that the government does not seem to understand what it is. He also asked how the government's highest officials could seek to so infringe on the rights of people lawfully in the country, and said the record convinced him that these officials, including the president, have a fearful view of freedom.

The trial record carries weight here. Government witnesses acknowledged that the campaign targeted more than 5,000 pro-Palestinian protesters. Witnesses for the plaintiffs testified that it stoked fear among academics and led some to stop their activism.

Two individual cases helped fuel the lawsuit. Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student, was released from an immigration jail by a lower court. Earlier this month, a three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision 2-1, bringing the government a step closer to detaining and ultimately deporting him. The panel did not decide whether the effort to remove Khalil over his campus activism and criticism of Israel was unconstitutional. It held instead that a federal judge in New Jersey lacked jurisdiction for now, because federal law requires the case to move fully through the immigration courts first. Khalil is a legal permanent resident, and it was not immediately clear whether the government would seek to detain him again while his challenges continue.

The other case was that of 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 had spread terror in campus communities. She said students and scholars should not have to fear that ICE agents could seize them from their homes for political expression, and that the judgment makes clear the campaign of intimidation must end. What to watch next is whether DHS responds, and whether the Third Circuit's Khalil ruling, which blocked immediate court review, shapes similar challenges.