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A Harvard faculty group won a lawsuit in late September against the Trump administration over its use of immigration policy to threaten noncitizens for their speech. Now, the group is asking a federal judge to extend protections to noncitizens nationwide.
In a proposed order filed Monday, the American Association of University Professors and several of its university chapters, including its chapter at Harvard, asked U.S. District Court Judge William G. Young ’62 to bar government officials from continuing to use immigration policy to target noncitizens for pro-Palestine and other speech. The faculty groups were joined by the Middle East Studies Association, which filed suit alongside the AAUP this spring.
The groups’ proposed order would outline a series of statements associated with pro-Palestine campus advocacy and stipulate that the government could not threaten noncitizens’ visa status for making any of the statements.
The list would include statements that criticized Israel’s actions in Gaza, opposed Zionism, or called for divestment from Israel. It would also protect statements deemed to be antisemitic or “to express support or sympathy for terrorism or a designated foreign terrorist organization such as Hamas.”
The AAUP and MESA first sued in March after the Trump administration arrested and revoked visas from several noncitizen students and faculty associated with pro-Palestine activism. Over the course of a nine-day trial this summer, Trump administration officials testified that the federal government relied on the doxxing website Canary Mission to create reports on more than 100 student protestors and that criticizing Israel could be grounds for a visa revocation.
Young’s ruling in the case, issued in late September, found the Trump administration violated the First Amendment by chilling speech through revoking the visas of faculty and students involved in pro-Palestine activism.
But the ruling was not accompanied by a prescription of relief for the plaintiffs, leaving both the faculty groups and the government waiting for next steps.
In September’s order, Young, an 85-year-old Reagan appointee with 40 years on the federal bench, was blistering in his appraisal of the Trump administration’s immigration policies and said remedies would need to go beyond payments or an injunctive order. But he has also expressed skepticism about whether the court would be able to provide effective relief to the plaintiffs in the face of President Donald Trump’s willingness to defy laws and court orders.
The court at first “thought an effective remedy might be obtainable; today it is not so sure,” Young wrote in September.
In a Monday court filing that accompanied the proposed order, the AAUP and MESA alleged that the Trump administration has flouted Young’s ruling. The groups pointed to the revocation of British commentator Sami Hamdi’s visa over anti-Israel statements in October, as well as repeated vows by the State Department and Department of Homeland Security to revoke the visas of noncitizens for their political speech.
The proposed speech protections, the groups wrote, would help stop the Trump administration from continuing to carry out unconstitutional arrests and deportations — but would not be effective unless they applied to all noncitizens, not just members of their organizations. A narrower order would impose logistical burdens, like requiring both organizations to disclose the identities of their members on an ongoing basis, and would only subject members and their speech to closer government scrutiny, the plaintiffs claimed.
By narrowing its scope to members of the two organizations, a more limited order would also fail to protect members’ conversations with nonmembers, whose speech might still be chilled, the AAUP and MESA argued.
The AAUP’s request could push Young into legal debates kicked off by the Supreme Court’s decision in June to limit lower courts’ ability to issue nationwide injunctions against federal policies. The AAUP and MESA acknowledged the new restrictions, but pointed out that the Supreme Court’s ruling left a carveout for nationwide injunctions when they are “necessary to provide complete relief to the plaintiffs.”
The proposed order would also require the State Department to notify noncitizens of the reason behind any visa revocation or removal proceedings that rely, at least in part, on their speech or protest activity.
The proposal would ask federal agencies to update the plaintiffs every 30 days with the total number of noncitizens whose visa status was revoked under a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows the federal government to remove noncitizens whose presence is deemed damaging to foreign policy interests. The statute was wielded by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to threaten noncitizen faculty and students with deportation earlier this year.
The AAUP and MESA also asked Young to require the Trump administration to develop trainings to ensure federal employees comply with the court’s ruling. The proposed order would also ask the State Department to publicly acknowledge that the First Amendment bans the arrest, detention, and deportation of noncitizens based on speech — which government lawyer Victoria M. Santora initially denied during the trial.
History professor Kirsten A. Weld, the president of Harvard’s AAUP chapter, wrote in a statement that faculty in the chapter “look forward to seeing the remedy Judge Young will put in place to protect our community — and campuses across the country — from the government’s unconstitutional conduct.”
—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.
—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.
