The arrest takes place in less than two minutes. Security camera footage shows a woman wearing a white coat and a pink headscarf walking along a Massachusetts street. Suddenly, a group of people dressed in black swoop toward her. She screams. “We’re the police,” one of the figures says, as the group handcuffs the woman—30-year-old Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish Ph.D. student at Tufts University—and pushes her into a black van.

Immigration officers grabbed Öztürk off the street on March 26, 2025, just days after the State Department voided her student visa. The previous year, she had coauthored an op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper encouraging the university to more seriously consider a student-backed resolution in support of divesting the university’s investments linked to Israel. As far as the Trump administration was concerned, this apparently constituted sufficient grounds to revoke her student visa. After federal officers seized Öztürk, she was shipped to immigration detention facilities in Vermont and then Louisiana. It took six weeks for her to be released on bail; for the last ten months, litigation continued over her freedom and the government’s continued quest to remove her from the country. Early in 2026, just less than a year into the second Trump administration, an immigration judge finally dismissed the government’s efforts to deport her.

Although Öztürk’s case may be unusually extreme, it is not unique. Shortly after Donald Trump took office for a second time, his administration embarked on a campaign of arrests and deportation threats against noncitizen students who had protested or in some way voiced support for Palestinians or criticism of the Israeli government. The Knight Institute, in its own litigation against this campaign, termed the effort an “ideological deportation policy.”

The effort has since run aground in the courts, as judges have repeatedly indicated concerns over the constitutionality of attempted deportations like Öztürk’s. In AAUP v. Rubio, the Knight Institute’s case, Judge William Young ruled that the overall policy violated the First Amendment rights of both the students and their interlocutors. Still, despite these losses, the administration has successfully instilled an environment of fear. Multiple friends who had arrived in the United States from politically repressive countries told me that the video of Öztürk’s arrest reminded them of how things had worked back home—exactly what they had immigrated to the United States to escape. Now, in America, they were newly weighing their desire to speak freely against the precarity of their status as immigrants. Even a green card was no longer adequate protection: Along with Öztürk, the administration has been attempting to deport the Columbia student and activist Mahmoud Khalil, who had become a legal permanent resident in November 2024.

It is not a coincidence that the Trump administration’s most vicious attacks on free expression have emerged in the area of immigration. Panic over immigration, after all, appears to be the driving force behind much of the government’s policymaking. But this is also a realm of domestic policy in which the executive’s powers are bound by fewer constraints, and in which it enjoys great deference from the judiciary in immigration enforcement.

As the immigration policy scholar Dara Lind has explored, this attack on the freedom of immigrants emphasizes the distinctions in status between those who are citizens and those who are not. Yet it also erodes the value of citizenship itself by chipping away at the rights of Americans who oppose the administration’s policies. The federal government has responded with fury to efforts by onlookers to document abuses by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol, charging mounting numbers of them with obstructing or assaulting federal officers. These prosecutions—many of which are flimsy and have been either dropped by the government or rejected by judges and juries—constitute an attack on free expression, too. They reflect the government’s inability to accept that anyone might legitimately oppose its brutal approach to immigration enforcement. Prosecuting observers and protestors is an easy way to frighten away would-be observers with the threat of prosecution.

In the course of my reporting for The Atlantic, I’ve been following these prosecutions of bystanders closely. It’s possible to imagine simple reforms that might limit the government’s ability to bring such cases abusively. For example, the underlying statute, 18 U.S.C. § 111, might be tweaked to emphasize that a person who “forcibly assaults, resists, opposes, impedes, intimidates, or interferes” with a federal officer may only be charged if their action significantly impairs the officer’s ability to carry out their duties. This would limit the government’s ability to prosecute, say, someone who threw a sandwich at a CBP officer in protest, or someone who scraped an officer’s hand when the officer pushed her up against a wall to stop her from filming an immigration arrest.

But this seems to me to elide the real underlying issue, which is the construction of immigration policy and enforcement as an area where speech protections are weakened in the face of executive power. Tackling this problem in earnest would require rethinking legal structures and unwinding doctrines of judicial deference that are deeply built into the law.

In addition to that, though, a simpler target for free-speech advocates are the provisions of the U.S. Code that allow the executive to deport or deny entry to noncitizens whose presence or activities the secretary of state has “reasonable ground to believe” would pose “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” The State Department relied on this authority in its effort to deport Öztürk and Khalil. When these provisions were passed into law in 1990, Congress emphasized its intent that the executive would use this power “sparingly and not merely because there is a likelihood that an alien will make critical remarks about the United States or its policies.” Clearly, this did not work out. There are few downsides to repealing the statute: The authority was little-used before the second Trump administration, and the government has plenty of discretion to regulate entry into the country on grounds other than political opinions.

Revoking these authorities will not, by any means, solve the problem of the weakened protections for free expression enjoyed by immigrants. But it would make their persecution more difficult. The government—in the way of all bullies—targeted Öztürk and her fellow students primarily because they were vulnerable. The solution, in part, is to make them less so.