President Trump’s immigration-enforcement tactics have been defined by a muscular use of executive power with little precedent. Now, a federal judge is tasked with deciding whether to curtail that approach against foreigners in the U.S. legally.
U.S. District Judge William Young in Boston wrapped up a closely watched trial this week on the administration’s targeting of international students engaged in campus activism. Following a series of high-profile arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters, faculty groups are pressing a broad legal effort to head off similar future arrests.
The litigation taps into rarely explored legal tensions between the government’s latitude to set the terms for foreigners living legally in the U.S. and the rights of those residents while they are here. Two weeks of testimony, including from government witnesses, offered a rare public window into the extraordinary measures the administration has taken against immigrants at elite universities.
The challengers, led by the American Association of University Professors, say the administration’s efforts to revoke green cards and visas from pro-Palestinian campus activists amount to proof of a policy of “ideological deportation” that has terrified noncitizens in higher education and chilled their speech.
“It is stifling dissent,” said Alexandra Conlon, a lawyer for the academics, in closing arguments on Monday. “That is the goal.”
Lawyers for the administration say there is no such policy. They also say that the government has long held far-reaching power to order the removal of noncitizens to protect the foreign-policy interests of the U.S. and that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is using it lawfully now. Foreigners in the U.S. don’t have the same protections as Americans when it comes to protesting, the Justice Department says.
“The answer to the question of whether aliens and citizens have equivalent rights under the First Amendment is no, they’re not equivalent,” Justice Department lawyer Ethan Kanter said in the government’s closing presentation.
Government witnesses testified that a “tiger team” at the Department of Homeland Security was given a list of 5,000 protesters to examine, most of whose names were taken from the website Canary Mission, which claims it “documents people and groups that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews.”
That team, which included analysts reassigned from counterterrorism intelligence work, produced around 200 reports on protesters to send to the State Department for Rubio to consider, said a DHS official, Peter Hatch. Hatch said some of those reports were created about international students who attended protests but weren’t suspected of having committed a crime.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents involved in some of the arrests testified that in decadeslong careers they had never seen the government attempt to deport anyone on the order of the secretary of state, or under similar circumstances.
Government lawyers argued throughout the trial that the administration wasn’t mounting a campaign to target international students or professors because of their political viewpoints. But government witnesses also testified about the administration’s willingness to order the deportation of people largely on the basis of what it considers to be antisemitic speech that is at odds with U.S. foreign-policy interests.
The judge, a Reagan appointee, has offered several observations that suggested skepticism of the government’s position. For example, Young said, “criticisms of the state of Israel aren’t antisemitism, they’re political speech, protected speech,” and added that he didn’t see criticism of the state of Israel as tantamount to support for Hamas either. He also expressed concern over immigration agents’ use of masks, saying that a common-sense inference was that this was intended to spread fear.
A handful of noncitizen faculty testified to experiencing panic after government efforts to deport Columbia University students and green-card holders Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, along with Yunseo Chung, a lawful permanent resident who has been in the U.S. since she was 7 years old. Often mentioned, too, was the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk, a student visa holder at Tufts University.
In each of those cases, judges have sided with the students and criticized the government’s actions as overreach—though Khalil, Mahdawi and Ozturk each spent weeks in detention before being freed.
Nadje Al-Ali, an anthropology professor at Brown and director of its Center for Middle East Studies until 2024, testified that she had flown to visit her mother in a care home in Germany, and heard soon after landing that Khalil had been taken into detention. She recalled thinking, “Oh, my God, I just left the country. What’s going to happen when I get back?”
She said she returned earlier than she had planned from Europe, contacted an immigration lawyer to keep in touch with her as she re-entered the U.S., and carefully curated her social media so that it was “all dogs, cats and recipes.”
Justice Department lawyers pointed out that none of the academics who testified had been contacted by government officials about their activities or political views, and that Al-Ali hadn’t been detained at Boston’s Logan airport on her return and hadn’t been subject to more than cursory questioning.
Young’s decision is expected in the coming weeks.
Write to Louise Radnofsky at louise.radnofsky@wsj.com