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Updated September 30, 2025, at 10:59 p.m.

A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that the Trump administration violated the First Amendment rights of international students and professors who participated in pro-Palestine advocacy, handing a victory to a Harvard faculty group that sued over the government’s use of immigration policy to crack down on activists.

U.S. District Court Judge William G. Young ’62 delivered a sharply-worded, 161-page opinion, ruling that federal officials worked to “intentionally to chill the rights to freedom of speech” by revoking visas of faculty and students involved in pro-Palestine activism.

“This case — perhaps the most important ever to fall within the jurisdiction of this district court — squarely presents the issue whether non-citizens lawfully present here in United States actually have the same free speech rights as the rest of us,” Young wrote. “The Court answers this Constitutional question unequivocally ‘yes, they do.’”

The American Association of University Professors — joined by its chapters at Harvard and other universities, as well as the Middle East Studies Association — filed a lawsuit in March accusing the Trump administration of arresting and attempting to deport noncitizen university affiliates on the basis of their political speech.

The case played out in federal court in July. The nine-day trial brought forward 15 witnesses — including senior federal officials and noncitizen University professors — and more than 250 documents, publicly highlighting the government’s internal decisions that led to the arrests of multiple student protesters.

Young did not mince words in his ruling on Tuesday, castigating Donald Trump and his administration for wielding immigration policy to chill free speech on university campuses across the country.

“I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected,” Young wrote.

Though Young ruled that the administration had acted unlawfully, he stopped short of detailing what relief for the plaintiffs could look like, deferring that process to a later hearing, which he wrote would be “promptly scheduled.”

Young wrote that the harms done by the federal government could not be remedied by money or an injunctive order alone, saying that “the harm here and the deprivation suffered runs far deeper.”

The court initially “thought an effective remedy might be obtainable; today it is not so sure,” Young wrote.

The AAUP’s lawsuit challenged what it described as the federal government’s “ideological deportation policy,” which involved targeting noncitizen students and faculty with arrest and deportation for their speech on Palestine and Israel. The government repeatedly argued that the policy does not exist.

Young wrote that while there was no written government policy of deporting all pro-Palestine noncitizens, the Trump administration performed a more “invidious” task: using immigration rules to make an example of select students and professors in order to intimidate others into self-censoring their speech.

At the heart of the case were the highly publicized arrests of five noncitizen student and faculty protesters, including Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk and Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil. None of the arrested individuals testified, but the AAUP’s case relied on the testimony of noncitizen faculty who told the court that the high-profile arrests caused them to refrain from political speech.

The government’s aim, Young wrote, was “tamping down pro-Palestinian student protests and terrorizing similarly situated non-citizen (and other) pro-Palestinians into silence because their views were unwelcome.”

Young’s ruling pointed to public statements and social media posts by Secretary of State Marco Rubio — in which Rubio repeatedly televised his intent to deport noncitizens who undermine “national security” — as evidence of a concerted effort to chill pro-Palestine speech.

“The bottom line is if you are coming here to stir up trouble on our campuses we will deny you a visa,” Rubio told Congress in May, in a line that was quoted in Young’s ruling. “I want to do more. I hope we can find more of these people.”

At points, Young mused about Trump’s “fixation with retribution” and wrote that the judiciary had been a “bulwark” for free speech under fire. He cited as an example the ruling by U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs in Harvard’s own case against the government’s termination of its research funding, which found that the funding freeze was retaliatory.

But Young was less sanguine about other institutions’ willingness to stand up to Trump. In his ruling, published hours before Trump said his administration was closing in on a deal with Harvard, Young took aim at “institutional leaders in higher education” who “meekly appease the President.”

“Our bastions of independent unbiased free speech — those entities we once thought unassailable — have proven all too often to have only Quaker guns,” Young wrote.

Young agreed that the AAUP and MESA both had standing in the case, but he removed individual schools’ AAUP chapters — based at Harvard, New York University, and Rutgers University — because they could not demonstrate how they were affected by the Trump administration’s policies. (Harvard Philosophy professor Bernhard Nickel, a German citizen, was the only member of any of the three chapters to testify in July.)

History professor Kirsten A. Weld, the president of Harvard’s AAUP chapter, wrote that she was “gratified to see a federal judge so powerfully affirm what we knew from the start to be true: that the Trump administration’s efforts to terrorize university affiliates into silence about Palestine were illegal and unconstitutional.”

“Importantly, too, it unequivocally confirms that non-citizens have the same free speech rights as citizens. This legal victory demonstrates once again that when our freedoms and core values are threatened, it is always, always worth standing up and fighting back,” Weld wrote.

—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.

—Staff writer Laurel M. Shugart can be reached at laurel.shugart@thecrimson.com. Follow them on X @laurelmshugart.