This spring, in association with the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, three university branches of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) brought a lawsuit to stop the Trump administration’s policy of ideological deportations targeting noncitizen students and scholars engaged in pro-Palestinian advocacy. The defendants — US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, Todd Lyons, the acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement ( ICE), and President Donald Trump — lost. The forces of repression have not been vanquished, but this legal victory is an important one for people who support the Palestinian liberation struggle and those opposed to the creep of authoritarianism across the United States. What this case shows is how linked those two struggles really are.

On September 30, 2025, Judge William G. Young, an eighty-four-year-old Ronald Reagan appointee, issued a ruling for AAUP v. Rubio that the judge called “perhaps the most important ever to fall within the jurisdiction of this district court.” It concisely answered the question of “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.’”

The ruling confirmed that the goal and effect of the government policy against those with pro-Palestinian views has been, as the plaintiffs’ argued in their filing, “by design . . .  [to] create a climate of repression and fear on university campuses.” The ruling against this government policy is a clear defense of the First Amendment’s protections of the right to free expression for all legal US residents, including and specifically for those who don’t like what Israel is doing and say so. The ruling asserts that there is “no ideological deportation policy,” but goes further to provide some analysis of the government’s political strategy: