Court: Trump Administration Unconstitutionally Targeted Noncitizens Protesting Gaza War

Judge Rules Trump Administration Unconstitutionally Targeted Noncitizens Over Gaza Protests.

A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration’s efforts to deport noncitizens who protested the Gaza war violated the Constitution. US District Judge William Young in Boston sided with university associations, calling the policy “ideological deportation” and a violation of the First Amendment. “Noncitizens lawfully present in the U.S. have the same free speech rights as the rest of us. The Court answers unequivocally: yes, they do,” Young wrote.

During the trial, witnesses testified that the administration had coordinated efforts to target students and scholars critical of Israel or sympathetic to Palestinians. Ramya Krishnan, senior attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute, said the policy created a “cloud of fear” over university communities and likened it to McCarthy-era repression.

The Trump administration maintained that visa revocations were based on immigration law, not protected speech. Officials including John Armstrong of the Bureau of Consular Affairs testified that they acted according to long-standing rules, though they acknowledged involvement in revoking visas of high-profile activists such as Rumeysa Ozturk and Mahmoud Khalil.

ICE official Peter Hatch revealed that over 5,000 pro-Palestinian protesters were reviewed, with reports filed on about 200 for potential legal violations. Khalil, a Columbia University graduate, spent 104 days in federal immigration detention, while Tufts student Ozturk was detained for six weeks after co-authoring an op-ed critical of her school’s Gaza response.

The ruling underscores that noncitizens enjoy full First Amendment protections, delivering a significant check on government overreach in targeting political speech.