BOSTON—Below are highlights from today’s proceedings in the trial before Judge William G. Young in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts in a case challenging the Trump administration’s policy of ideological deportation.

  • A senior Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official testified that he signed the letters referring Rümeysa Öztürk, Mahmoud Khalil, and other student protesters to the State Department for visa revocation or a determination of removability.

    • The official, Andre Watson, leads the National Security Division in ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unit. Watson testified that, beginning in early 2025, ICE and the State Department coordinated on a new process to implement President Trump’s executive orders targeting student protesters. In this process, HSI’s Office of Intelligence would collect names based on referrals and write dossiers on those people. (Peter Hatch, a senior official in the Office of Intelligence, testified last week that many of those names came from the Canary Mission website.) The Office of Intelligence would then pass some of these dossiers on to Watson, who would in turn refer them to the State Department. Watson admitted that he has never declined to refer a case to the State Department.

    • Watson testified that the referral letters he signed—entered into evidence by the court but not shown to the public gallery—rely on the Office of Intelligence’s dossiers, which discuss protesters’ pro-Palestinian views and include material from Canary Mission.

    • Watson also admitted that the letter referring Khalil to the State Department was sent only one day before Khalil’s arrest. He was cross-examined by Ramya Krishnan of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

  • Tomorrow’s witnesses: John Armstrong, the most senior official in the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs; and Veena Dubal, a law professor at UC Irvine and the general counsel of the AAUP.

A transcript of today’s testimony will be available shortly here.

The trial began on Monday, July 7 and is expected to end on Monday, July 21.

Read daily trial updates here.

Members of the press need to register daily to access the trial livestream here.

Read more about the case here.

Lawyers on the case include Ramya Krishnan, Jameel Jaffer, Alex Abdo, Scott Wilkens, Carrie DeCell, Xiangnong (George) Wang, Talya Nevins, Jackson Busch, and Stephany Kim for the Knight First Amendment Institute, Ahilan Arulanantham, Michael Tremonte, Noam Biale, Alexandra Conlon, and Courtney Gans for Sher Tremonte, and Edwina Clarke and David Zimmer for Zimmer, Citron & Clarke.

For more information, contact: Adriana Lamirande, [email protected].