Cristian Farias

In my many years as a legal journalist, I’ve covered countless hearings, court rulings, proceedings, criminal cases, immigration cases, high-profile Supreme Court showdowns, cases big and small, at all levels of the judiciary. But what I witnessed last Friday wasn’t like anything I’ve covered before.

One case, two different locations, almost like a parallel universe in a federal courtroom in Vermont, in an ICE detention center in Louisiana. What I saw left me cold, disgusted even. At one point I got a knot in my throat. This was not a normal court proceeding. None of it felt normal. This was a bail hearing, essentially a plea for freedom from incarceration. The petitioner was a young scholar from Turkey. The government had arrested and detained her for co-authoring an opinion piece in the student newspaper. As of that day, she had been imprisoned for more than six weeks for expressing an opinion.

Here’s what I saw. A 30-year-old woman wearing a hijab in an orange jumpsuit with a lawyer by her side testifying for her own freedom. She was in a bright lit empty room speaking into a camera. The rest of us, the judge, the government, her legal team, the reporters, all watched her from the other side of a Zoom call. As she spoke, she pressed both hands to her heart. She described her deplorable conditions of confinement, her struggles with asthma while in detention, the substandard medical treatment, that her condition had gotten worse, that she had to share a cell with 23 other people for 22 hours a day. She told the story of a nurse who took off her hijab without her consent. All of that was dark, but then there was some light.

When the topic moved to her life’s work, the scholar’s demeanor changed. She kept her hands close to her chest but pressed both palms together as if she were praying. You could see a glimmer in her eyes as she spoke about her research at Tufts University, working with young people to study the way they deploy social media to make a positive impact in the world. Bail hearings tend to be adversarial with the government fighting tooth and nail to keep a person locked up. This wasn’t that. Others spoke on her behalf. Meanwhile, the government presented no witnesses. The lawyer representing this woman’s captors had nothing on her. He barely spoke. The hearing felt lopsided.

During testimony from a respiratory expert, of all people, the unthinkable happened. Rümeysa Öztürk suffered an asthma attack in the middle of the hearing as the rest of us watched. In disbelief, she excused herself from the call and her lawyer just sat there motionless, clearly uncomfortable, waiting several minutes for her client to return. None of this is normal. None of this should be happening.

My name is Christian Farias. I am the host of “The Bully’s Pulpit: Trump v. The First Amendment,”  a new show from the Knight Institute following the many ways the President of the United States and his administration are laying waste to freedom of expression across the country. That includes the speech of Rümeysa Öztürk, of Mahmoud Khalil, of Mohsen Mahdawi and of the countless people who are being silenced by these arrests, in the case of these students and many others, for advocating for Palestinian lives and an end to the war in Gaza, but that’s not the only speech that’s come under assault. Each week, “The Bully’s Pulpit” will center the stories of the people, communities, and institutions the government is targeting for not falling in line with the Trump agenda and the advocates standing up to defend them.

Many First Amendment freedoms are at stake right now. The freedom to teach, learn and grow, the freedom to organize and peacefully assemble to bring about change, the freedom to report on the news without fear or favor. The freedom to represent causes and clients without government interference. The freedom to study and research without worrying about the words you use. The freedom to advocate for a diverse, equitable and inclusive society. The freedom to write an op-ed in your student newspaper without fear that mass agents may one day come for you.

The American public has seen so many videos of agents of the state interacting violently with people on the street, but Rümeysa encounter with ICE in Somerville, Massachusetts was different. It was an ambush. Six agents in plainclothes, all of them wearing face coverings, approaching a woman who barely had a chance to even process what was happening. You could hear her panicked screams. One of the agents takes her phone. Another one begins to take off her backpack, which then gets tossed on the ground. At one point she asks, "Do you want to take those masks off?" But they ignore her. She’s handcuffed with her hands behind her back and taken to an unmarked car. Her lawyer later told reporters Rümeysa was on her way to a dinner to break her Ramadan fast With friends.

In the footage, you can overhear a neighbor ask, "Is this a kidnapping?" At the site of Rümeysa’s abduction, a few of the neighbors place flowers as if it were a memorial to someone who died. Right above the flowers, they left a sign that read, "ICE kidnapped our neighbor." According to the Department of Homeland Security, Rümeysa had engaged in activities in support of Hamas. The video of her abduction went viral. People took to the streets.

Students

Students are under attack. What do we do? Stand up, fight back.

Cristian Farias

Her legal team raced to federal court that very same day, and at 10:55 p.m. that night, a federal judge ordered the government to keep Rümeysa in New England to preserve the court’s jurisdiction and decide Rümeysa to release her. The government didn’t comply. The morning after on March 26th at approximately 4:00 in the morning, ICE agents transported Rümeysa to an airport in Burlington, Vermont and placed her on a plane to Louisiana where she would stay for the next several weeks.

Rümeysa’s congressional leaders went to visit her at the ICE detention center there. They went there on a fact-finding mission. In an essay in The New York Times reflecting on their visit, they compared her situation to something that happens in an authoritarian regime where dissent is squashed and the rule of law doesn’t exist. At a local town hall, Massachusetts representative Ayanna Pressley called her a political prisoner. This is what Rümeysa told Pressley about her arrest.

Ayanna Pressley

She shared with me that when they transitioned her from handcuffs to shackles, she thought surely she was going to be killed, but they would torture her before.

Cristian Farias

None of this was happening in a vacuum. Simultaneously, the Trump administration ramped up its attacks on colleges and universities. Just as Rümeysa was being whisked away and her student visa canceled, scores of other international students all across the country were seeing their own futures thrown into chaos. More than a thousand student visas were terminated without explanation. In the face of all of this, advocates raced to federal court to respond to these abuses. In many cases, they explicitly raised the First Amendment that it protects the students rights as non-citizens and, increasingly across the board, the students are winning.

Back to what I saw last Friday. Rümeysa Öztürk recovered from her asthma episode and returned to the hearing room. After hearing from two other witnesses, the judge was ready to rule. Without mincing words, Judge William Sessions ordered Rümeysa’s immediate release. Finding that she had made a substantial claim that her constitutional rights were violated, her continued detention cannot stand, the judge said from the bench. Without anything of substance from the Trump administration, the judge credited Rümeysa’s argument instead, that the reason she had been detained is simply and purely the expression that she made in the op-ed, in violation of her First Amendment rights.

Judge Sessions made another finding, and one that really matters at this very moment. Quote, "Her continued detention potentially chills the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens. Any one of them may now avoid exercising their First Amendment rights for fear of being whisked away to a detention center."

She was free that same day. She was more than 1600 miles from home but free. She was back in Massachusetts the next day. At a news conference, she said despite what she endured, she was filled with gratitude for all the people who stepped up to defend her, to support her, to send her letters and notes of encouragement. And she added-

Rümeysa Öztürk

America is the greatest democracy in the world, and I believe in those values that we share. I have faith in the American system of justice.

Cristian Farias

That blows my mind. Imagine being forcibly taken from your home and your community, kept isolated from everyone without justification, with your lawyers wondering where you are, imprisoned unjustly for more than six weeks, subject to worsening health conditions, missing out on your studies and critical deadlines for a career that you love and so much more. Our own government took so much from Rümeysa Öztürk, and yet she still has faith in American democracy and the justice system.

The reason her hearing left me cold is precisely because, for much of it, it felt like a different world. It didn’t feel like a system of justice. Yet Rümeysa and her advocates didn’t give up on it. They fought for her freedom and won.

Every week on “The Bully’s Pulpit,” we’ll bring you the First Amendment news making headlines, updates on how cases are moving through the courts, who’s fighting back, who’s not, and what’s happening with ongoing assaults on free expression. This week, for example, we learned that the Trump administration announced a new round of unlawful funding cuts to Harvard and the university responded immediately by amending its lawsuit challenging this latest overreach. In legal filings, we also learned that Yunseo Chung, a Columbia student whom ICE is trying to deport and has gone into hiding, was named alongside Mahmoud Khalil in a State Department memo purporting to cancel their legal permanent residence status.

According to Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, their presence and activities in the US would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences. In another legal filing in a case where the Knight Institute is co-counsel, the US Department of Agriculture told a judge that it will restore the climate change related web content that was removed post-inauguration. As that lawsuit contends, this content is critical for farmers and communities to make informed decisions about their futures and livelihoods. And we’d be remiss to not mention Badar Khan Suri, the Georgetown researcher who has been incarcerated in Texas since March over his pro-Palestinian speech. A judge ordered him released on Wednesday. According to The Washington Post, when he reunited with his family late that same day, he said, "I am free, but things are not complete. Other students should be free." Like other judges, the federal judge who released him said the First Amendment doesn’t distinguish between citizens and non-citizens.

We started today’s show with the case of Rümeysa Öztürk, her return to freedom, her enduring faith in the justice system and how her case is part of a broader pattern of silencing pro-Palestinian student voices. To get a deeper sense of the moment that we’re in, and because this is our very first episode, I want to bring in Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight Institute. He has more experience than me hosting podcasts and about the First Amendment more broadly, but he also has spent the first few months of the second Trump administration thinking deeply about why this moment in modern US history feels different than other periods.

Jameel, welcome to the show.

Jameel Jaffer

Thanks so much, Christian. Happy to be here.

Cristian Farias

It’s truly a pleasure to have this conversation. Let’s talk about “The Bully’s Pulpit.” Why is this show so needed now?

Jameel Jaffer

We’re living in this kind of crazy period in which the federal government is engaged in something like an all-out assault on the freedoms of speech and the press and association, all the freedoms that the First Amendment protects. And there have obviously been other times in American history when the federal government engaged in sustained attacks on those freedoms, but this is really quite different than anything we’ve experienced before. The obvious analogies are to the first Red Scare during and immediately after the First World War and the Second Red Scare, the McCarthy era after the Second World War, but I would say that the Trump administration’s assaults on First Amendment freedoms go beyond anything we have seen before in this country. So it’s a pretty crazy and, in some ways, terrible time for the First Amendment and for our democracy as well.

Cristian Farias

Now, you heard Rümeysa Öztürk’s voice at the top of the show while she was speaking during a news conference last weekend. Despite everything she endured and everything the US government took from her, she said that she still believes in our system of justice. Now, you’re a litigator and you want to win cases, so I imagine you feel the same way as her, yet a lot of people don’t for various reasons. Why is this not the time to give up on the First Amendment?

Jameel Jaffer

The First Amendment can be a really powerful tool for marginalized people and for political dissidents in particular. Rümeysa’s case only underscores that. Now, that’s not to say that contemporary First Amendment doctrine is what it should be or that the First Amendment is enough in itself to stave off authoritarianism. Of course, it isn’t, but it would be a really big mistake, I think, to take the First Amendment’s protections for granted. We need those protections now more than ever.

Cristian Farias

Mahmoud Khalil is still in detention but he and the other students, including Rümeysa, are being taken very seriously by the court system. Of course, their cases are far from over and they’re incredibly complex. Yet judges are recognizing the First Amendment stakes. What do you make of their wins so far?

Jameel Jaffer

Well, you’re definitely right that these cases are only just beginning, and so it’s maybe a little bit dangerous to predict the ultimate outcomes based on what’s happened so far. That said, I think it’s notable and very encouraging that every judge to have addressed this question over the last few weeks has come to the same conclusion that the First Amendment prohibits the government from arresting and detaining and deporting foreign students based solely on their political views. Every judge to have addressed that question has come to that conclusion, and I think that’s an encouraging thing and a sign that federal judges see these policies as irreconcilable with the values that the First Amendment is supposed to uphold.

Cristian Farias

I do have a little bit of deja vu with some of these rulings and filings. One case that I see popping up in the citations is Ragbir v. Homan, a Second Circuit case that was litigated many years ago during the first Trump administration. The Knight Institute filed an amicus brief in that case, and it’s kind of remarkable that in a way we’re reliving the first Trump administration but in a new context, and I’m curious what you make of that.

Jameel Jaffer

I mean, I think we saw it even before the first Trump administration, these issues of what are the First Amendment rights of non-citizens. That question has come up over and over again in one way or another over the course of American history. There is this case from 1945, a Supreme Court case called Bridges v. Wixon, in which the Supreme Court says quite explicitly that non-citizens in the United States enjoy the protection of the First Amendment. Despite that opinion, there is disagreement about what protection specifically the First Amendment provides to non-citizens, whether that protection extends to the deportation context. And so there was, I would say, some degree of uncertainty about how courts would address these cases of students being arrested and threatened with deportation based on their pro-Palestinian advocacy.

So that’s why I say it’s actually encouraging to see these courts now all reaching the same conclusion in these cases. There was a court just a couple of days ago that reached this conclusion in a case involving Muhammad Huck, who is a student who was detained in Minnesota. So again, one court after another reaching the same conclusion, the First Amendment protects non-citizens, including in the context of deportation.

Cristian Farias

Yeah, there’s this enduring clash in constitutional law between the First Amendment and the President’s prerogatives to conduct foreign policy. We saw that during the first Trump administration and the Muslim ban case, and I’m curious, despite what we’re seeing with the courts and these wins so far, whether we can expect that these cases will meet the buzzsaw that is the Supreme Court.

Jameel Jaffer

Yeah, I mean, it’s true that the Supreme Court has generally given the executive branch, the President in particular, broad latitude when it comes to national security and foreign policy, but the executive’s foreign policy and national security powers have to be understood alongside the guarantees that the First Amendment provides.

And the Supreme Court has often had to reconcile those two commands of the Constitution. I mean, maybe most famously in the Pentagon Papers case where the Nixon administration argued to the Supreme Court that allowing The New York Times and The Washington Post to publish stories based on the Pentagon Papers, that was a secret report about the Vietnam War, that allowing them to publish those stories would jeopardize United States foreign policy interests. And the Supreme Court rejected that argument. The Supreme Court said, "Well, you say foreign policy is going to be undermined, but the First Amendment says that these newspapers have a right to publish," and its bottom line was that The New York Times and The Washington Post had a constitutional right to publish those stories.

The mere invocation of foreign policy or national security does not end the analysis. You still have to ask can those foreign policy arguments be reconciled with the guarantees of the First Amendment?

Cristian Farias

And I’m curious, in this climate of uncertainty, not everyone is doing what these students are doing. These students are fighting back, they’re bringing lawsuits, they’re teaming up with advocates. People are protesting on their behalf, but others aren’t doing any of those things. They’re capitulating and I’m curious why do you think that’s so appealing at this moment for some?

Jameel Jaffer

At some level, I think this logic is very easy to understand. If you’re any particular individual actor thinking about all of this in a very narrow way, it may seem like it’s the best course of action just to surrender on some relatively discrete issue in the hope that you will win the favor of the administration, or at least in the hope that the administration will move on to some other target. But I think we have seen over and over again that that kind of thinking is a mistake, both at the tactical and the strategic level.

This administration reopens deals all the time. It makes demands that institutions can’t possibly agree to without surrendering their own values and integrity, and every time one institution capitulates, it increases the pressure on the next institution to capitulate. And I think that if everybody approaches these questions in this sort of narrow, I would say, myopic way, then very quickly these freedoms that exist on paper will exist only on paper. We don’t have to do a lot of original thinking here to understand how this is going to play out because we have seen it in places like Hungary or Turkey or India.

Cristian Farias

One thing Rümeysa said at her news conference was that she thinks the US still has the greatest democracy in the world. I don’t want you to comment on that per se, but I do want you to talk about the connection between the First Amendment and democracy. How are the two related?

Jameel Jaffer

The First Amendment is integrally connected to democracy. The principal point of the First Amendment is to make it possible for us to govern ourselves. It protects our right to communicate with each other, and every victory of the kind that Rümeysa Öztürk is justifiably so grateful for, every victory like that builds a little bit the First Amendment that we need.

The other side of that coin is that every attack on the First Amendment should also be understood as an attack on democracy. I think it is genuinely shocking that our government is putting people behind bars on the basis of their political views. I mean, this is the one thing that the First Amendment is supposed to prevent. It is the one thing that separates democracies from autocracies.

This is the principle. You can say what you believe without having to worry that you’ll be imprisoned for it. These students are being arrested and detained and threatened with deportation, not because they present some threat to national security, not because they engaged in some kind of criminal conduct, but because they said things that the administration disagrees with, and it is truly disturbing that this is taking place here. It’s the kind of thing that one would ordinarily expect in the world’s most repressive societies, but it is taking place in our own backyards.

Cristian Farias

Indeed. In fact, when I was at that hearing for Rümeysa, I almost felt like I was in another universe. It didn’t feel like the U.S.

Jameel Jaffer

One of the things that has really struck me in watching these students fight back is the incredible courage. And when you said to me is the First Amendment the most important tool we have to fight back against these kinds of policies? No, it’s not. The most important tool is that kind of courage that we see these students, both the ones who’ve been detained and the ones who are coming to their defense, exhibit. That’s the most important thing we have.

Cristian Farias

Thank you so much, Jameel, for joining us on “The Bully’s Pulpit.” It was wonderful speaking with you.

Jameel Jaffer

Thanks, Christian.

Cristian Farias

“The Bully’s Pulpit” is a production of the Knight First Amendment Institute of Columbia University. I’m your host, Christian Farias. This episode was written by me and co-produced by Anne-Maria Watt and Candace White. Our associate producer and fact-checker for this episode is Kushil Dev. Our sound engineer is Patrick McNameeKing. Candace White is our executive producer. Our music comes from Epidemic Sound. The art for our show was designed by Astrid da Silva. Thanks to Jameel Jaffer who joined us for this episode. 

“The Bully’s Pulpit” is available on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you listen to podcasts. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website, knightcolumbia.org. That’s Knight with a K, and follow us on social media. See you next time.