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Closing arguments for a faculty group’s lawsuit against the Trump administration’s immigration policies concluded on Monday, leaving the judge to sort through evidence from the trial and dozens of sealed records before making a final ruling.
The lawsuit was filed in April by the American Association of University Professors and its chapters at Harvard and several other universities. The organization alleged that the federal government had targeted noncitizen students and faculty for arrest and deportation based on their pro-Palestinian speech, violating the First Amendment.
Much of the trial has revolved around the question of whether the federal government maintained an “ideological deportation policy,” a charge that its lawyers denied. U.S. District Judge William G. Young ’62 has remained skeptical of the policy’s existence, though he has repeatedly shot down the government’s attempts to exclude interagency communications from the record.
The government petitioned the First Circuit Court of Appeals to intervene mid-trial, asking the higher court to bar emails and records from evidence, citing a privilege that applies to presidential communications. The First Circuit, siding with Young and dismissing the petition on Friday, allowed the documents to be filed under seal.
But Young pressed the AAUP’s lawyers during their closing arguments on Monday, arguing that they must show intent behind the Trump administration’s actions to prove that the identified noncitizens were truly targeted as a result of their political speech.
“The goal is to chill speech. The goal is to silence students and scholars who wish to express pro-Palestinian views. It is stifling dissent, that is the goal,” Alexandra Conlon, a lawyer for the AAUP, said in her closing argument.
The AAUP identified five noncitizen student protesters as the alleged targets of the policy, including Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk and Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil. Though none of the five protesters are plaintiffs in the suit, the organization argued that the policy had a “chilling effect” on free speech on university campuses.
Lawyers for the federal government argued on Monday that, at least in the context of deportations, noncitizens do not have the same First Amendment rights as citizens.
“The answer to the question as to whether noncitizens have the same rights as a citizen is no,” government lawyer Ethan B. Kanter said Monday, adding that noncitizens do not benefit from the “full panoply” of First Amendment protections. Young — who has posed the question several times over the course of the trial — seemed skeptical of the government’s answer.
“In a country where free speech is the safeguard of democracy, that cannot be the law,” Ramya Krishnan, a lawyer for the AAUP, said, adding that a ruling that determines noncitizens do not have First Amendment protections in certain instances would “make a mockery of noncitizens’ First Amendment rights.”
The government has repeatedly argued that, with no explicit “ideological deportation policy” in writing, the AAUP’s case falls flat.
William Kanellis, a lawyer for the Trump administration, said that — of the thousands of names the DHS combed through — immigration enforcement action was only taken against 0.38 percent of the pro-Palestine protestors in its system.
“This is not a policy, it’s not even a statistical anomaly,” Kanellis said.
Lawyers for the AAUP have cited public statements from President Donald Trump and other top U.S. officials as proof that the government intentionally deported noncitizens to stifle speech, substantiating the alleged policy. Young seemed to doubt whether these statements amounted to an intentional First Amendment violation by the officials in the State Department and Department of Homeland Security who enforced the laws.
Young called into question whether the alleged deportation policy, if it exists, deviates from the authority over immigration enforcement that the agencies have long exercised. Lawyers for the Trump administration have repeatedly argued that the federal government’s immigration enforcement — including the arrests of the five identified students — falls within its existing legal authority.
Federal officials have repeatedly cited a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows the State Department to terminate visas of those they deem “adverse to U.S. foreign policy.” The argument hinges on a January executive order that makes combating antisemitism the country’s official foreign policy.
“In the implementation of those provisions, this is simply another line that has to be drawn in difficult circumstances,” Ethan B. Kanter, a lawyer for the federal government, said on Monday in reference to the arrests of the student protestors.
But the AAUP argued that, still, the government failed to do its due diligence before pursuing action under the INA, citing testimony from eight officials from the Department of Homeland Security and State Department that revealed an accelerated process to investigate student protestors.
Peter J. Hatch, who oversees the DHS’s Office of Intelligence, testified last Wednesday that his office created reports on student protestors, drawing names from a list of more than 5,000 from the Canary Mission, a pro-Israel doxxing site that rose to popularity in the fall of 2023. Hatch testified that a “tiger team” of analysts and DHS agents was assembled to parse through the records expeditiously — ultimately creating around 100 reports.
The reports, containing a compilation of facts about the subject’s biographic information and potential criminal activity, were used to base a recommendation for visa revocation or arrest to the State Department.
Andre Watson, the assistant director of the DHS’s Homeland Security Investigations branch who testified on Thursday, was responsible for summarizing the reports into actionable recommendations to the State Department — a process which the AAUP argued made “enormous inferential leaps” in justifying the arrests of student protestors.
They pointed to the report made for Ozturk, the Tufts graduate student who was arrested by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers in March, as a key example. The report, part of which was shown publicly in court last week, notes that Ozturk co-authored an op-ed in her campus newspaper that calls for divestment from Israel. Drawing only on information contained in the report, Watson drafted a letter that called Ozturk “pro-Hamas” and recommended that the State Department revoke her visa and arrest her.
Just next door to the AAUP’s case was the first hearing of Harvard’s own case against the federal government, alleging that its nearly $3 billion freeze on research funding was a violation of free speech.
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And outside the John Joseph Moakley Courthouse, nearly a hundred supporters of the AAUP and Harvard gathered outside at a rally organized by Crimson Courage, an alumni group formed earlier this year that has advocated for academic freedom and Harvard’s resistance to the Trump administration.
The AAUP organized a second press conference Monday afternoon with remarks from Khalil, the Columbia graduate student who was arrested by ICE in March after leading pro-Palestinian protests on Columbia’s campus.
“My arrest was not accidental. It was the culmination of a deliberate strategy from the Trump administration to criminalize dissent,” Khalil said.
Young has requested post-trial filings from both sides by the end of next week, and is expected to rule on the case in the coming weeks.
“We cannot live in fear. AAUP and our partners will not cower in silence,” AAUP National President Todd Wolfson said in the press conference. “We will stand with and for higher education writ large. We will stand for democracy.”
—Staff writer Akshaya Ravi can be reached at akshaya.ravi@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @akshayaravi22.
—Staff writer Laurel M. Shugart can be reached at laurel.shugart@thecrimson.com. Follow them on X @laurelmshugart.
