(Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com) A federal judge in Boston ruled on Tuesday that the Trump administration violated the Constitution with its effort to deport critics of Israel, and affirmed that non-citizens in the US legally have the same right to free speech as Americans.
“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 the United States actually have the same free speech rights as the rest of us. The Court answers this Constitutional question unequivocally ‘yes, they do,” said District Judge William Young, who was nominated by President Reagan.
The ruling was the result of a lawsuit brought by several university associations that alleged the arrest of college students and faculty who participated in pro-Palestine protests violated the First Amendment and had a chilling effect on speech.
“In his 161-page opinion, the judge analyzed the Trump administration’s allegations against several non-citizens, including Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk, and rightly recognized that they were targeted purely for their political views and speech,” Jenin Younis, a civil liberties attorney and legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, told Antiwar.com.
“He rejected the argument that non-citizens lack First Amendment protections, correctly observing that it serves as a restraint on government, without respect to the immigration status of the speaker,” Younes added.
In his ruling, Young said that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and their subordinates “acted in concert to misuse the sweeping powers of their respective offices to target non-citizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their First Amendment-protected political speech.”
Young said Rubio and Noem carried out this policy “in order to strike fear into similarly situated non-citizen pro-Palestinian individuals, pro-actively (and effectively) curbing lawful pro-Palestinian speech and intentionally denying such individuals (including the plaintiffs here) the freedom of speech that is their right.”
The judge added that the effect of the campaign against pro-Palestinian non-citizens “continues unconstitutionally to chill freedom of speech to this day.”
This article originally appeared at Antiwar.com.
