BOSTON—The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University today formally asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts to declare the Trump administration’s policy of arresting, detaining, and threatening to deport noncitizen students and faculty members for their pro-Palestinian advocacy unlawful, and to block its further implementation. Judge William G. Young in September ruled that the policy violates the First Amendment and affirmed that “non-citizens lawfully present here in [the] United States actually have the same free speech rights as the rest of us.” 

“Government officials have vigorously maintained they have the authority to deport foreign citizens based on lawful speech since the beginning of this case—and, incredibly, they doubled down on this dangerous claim after the court ruled that this policy is unconstitutional," said Ramya Krishnan, senior staff attorney at the Knight Institute. “It’s crucial that the court order the government to abandon this unconstitutional policy. The Trump administration should not be permitted to go on terrorizing foreign citizens for political expression that the First Amendment protects.”

Filed in March, the lawsuit–brought by the Knight Institute and Sher Tremonte LLP on behalf of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Middle East Studies Association (MESA)–alleged that the Trump administration’s “ideological deportation” policy is unconstitutional. It was the first major trial of President Trump’s second term. The nine-day trial in July that included the testimony of 15 witnesses forced the disclosure of a wealth of new details about the policy and its devastating effects on campuses nationwide. See a summary of the disclosures, here.

Today’s motion asks the court to formally declare that the policy violates the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), to vacate and set aside the policy under the APA, and to permanently enjoin the administration’s further implementation of it. The motion also proposes a series of notice, transparency, and training requirements the court should require the government to adhere to in order to counteract the ideological deportation policy’s chilling effects and ensure compliance with the court’s ruling. 

Read today’s motion here.

Read more about the case here.

In addition to the AAUP and MESA, plaintiffs include AAUP chapters at Harvard, Rutgers, and NYU. The associations’ members include tens of thousands of faculty and students across the country.

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

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