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:

It was never the Secretaries’ [Rubio and Noem] immediate intention to deport all pro-Palestinian non-citizens for that obvious First Amendment violation, that could have raised a major outcry. Rather, the intent of the Secretaries was more invidious — to target a few for speaking out and then use the full rigor of the Immigration and Nationality Act (in ways it had never been used before) to have them publicly deported with the goal of tamping down pro-Palestinian student protests and terrorizing similarly situated non-citizen (and other) pro-Palestinians into silence because their views were unwelcome.

Although the remedies have not yet been issued and the Trump administration has vowed to appeal, the decision has the potential to leave a significant political mark in support of the movement for Palestinian liberation — if activists make use of it. It behooves those fighting for Palestinian rights and against American autocracy to understand it. So long as the rule of law is a value that people uphold — or at least know they have to pay lip service to — and so long as judges still have some authority in the United States, this ruling offers a weapon for fighting every boardroom bully, university administrator, classroom mole, and ICE agent who tries to shut you up.

The campaign of repression that AAUP v. Rubio challenges became public — intentionally — when news about the detention of students who had spoken out in support of Palestinian rights spread internationally after Mahmoud Khalil was arrested in the lobby of his Columbia University student housing. A Palestinian green card holder and campus leader, Khalil was held in a Louisiana detention center for more than three months, threatened with deportation for being critical of Israel and participating in demonstrations against Israel’s war in Gaza. The government falsely accused him of antisemitic activities that “creat[e] a hostile environment for Jewish students,” which Trump’s Executive Order 14188, Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism, claims to be fighting. As Judge Young’s ruling highlights, President Trump trotted out Khalil’s arrest as an intimidating warning:

On March 10, 2025, the President posted on social media: “Following my previously signed Executive Orders, ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of Columbia University. This is the first arrest of many to come.”

Khalil is still threatened with deportation. On September 12, an immigration judge in Louisiana rushed to rule Khalil deportable on what Khalil’s lawyers assert were baseless, pretextual grounds — in this case meaning political grounds — but they’re appealing and Khalil is suing for damages.

The footage of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish student at Tufts being arrested by masked and hooded ICE agents from a street in Sommerville, Massachusetts, was also part of the government’s plan. A young woman being kidnapped and bundled into an unmarked car because of an op-ed in her student newspaper criticizing the University’s position on investments with Israel caused many — including people in the United States and those considering whether to travel there — to wonder how far the authoritarian repression of the freedom of speech would go. Judge Young remarks in a footnote:

Whether intentional or not, images of plain-clothed, masked federal agents — faceless agents of the federal government — snatching a non-violent person off the streets of Boston has caused fear in citizens and non-citizens alike.

Khalil and Öztürk were detained and threatened with deportation because the government claimed their pro-Palestine activities and speech were antisemitic and would “have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences and would compromise a compelling U.S. foreign policy interest.” The ruling’s summary of the case paints a stark picture of the US government’s prioritization of Israel’s agenda over the upholding of the Constitution. As Judge Yong observed, Trump’s administration is “following in virtual lock-step the foreign policy of the State of Israel.”

Judge Young’s 161-page ruling is remarkable in many ways. It is sprinkled with literary and historical references; it is saturated with a tone of outrage at the US administrations’ violations of democratic principles — he uses the adjective “invidious” twice — it includes barely polite observations about their misinterpretations of the law, and anger at their disregard for the Constitution. It is full of patriotic admonitions and appreciations for a certain vision of the United States as a “great nation” because Americans “still practice our frontier tradition of selflessness for the good of us all.” In the midst of all this rhetorical flag-waving, there are important statements that not only uphold the right of pro-Palestinian speech and expression, but also shoot down the smoke screen of anti-antisemitism used to justify the repression of criticism of Israel.

The Judge quotes himself:

As the Court indicated during trial, and discusses further in its rulings of law, infra, “[c]riticisms of the State of Israel are not anti-Semitism, they’re political speech, protected speech. Even strong,  . . . vile criticisms of the State of Israel and its policies are protected speech . . . . [T]he [hypothetical or alleged] conduct of the State of Israel [as] — involv[ing] war crimes, as involv[ing] genocide, . . . those matters are protected speech. . . . under the First Amendment to our Constitution.”

This suit is one in a slew that the AAUP and other groups have brought to challenge Trump’s policies against higher education. Judge Young’s ruling came not long after another of Trump’s efforts was shot down in the courts. On September 3, 2025, a federal judge in Boston ruled that the administration “used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities” when it froze billions of dollars in federal research funds.

Zionist activists across the United States, Canada, and Europe have weaponized the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) redefinition of antisemitism to equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Survey-based reports by legal and academic organizations and researchers have demonstrated that this false equation of antisemitism and criticism of Israel has been deployed cynically as a political tool of harassment and repression in the United States, Europe, and Australia. Zionist activists use it to intimidate and stymie pro-Palestinian students, faculty, government employees, and those engaged in government-funded civic activities. Now, with the help of scholars and lawyers from the AAUP and MESA, a US judge has pointed out that the emperors have no clothes, even if their ICE minions try to hide behind masks and hoodies.

Through this court case, an American judge has discovered what Palestine activists have known for a long time: that governmental trampling of the rights of Palestinians and their supporters is a thin edge of a wedge by which everyone’s rights are being rolled back. Judge Young’s ruling comes at what might be an inflection point in the fight against authoritarianism and the fight for Palestinian rights, showing just how inextricably bound together those two fights are.

In addition to his attacks on free speech and academic freedom, Trump is following the authoritarian playbook in a variety of arenas: degrading the judiciary, cracking down on law firms, starving public, independent media, and squeezing civic groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and funders supporting progressive causes. It all makes the struggle for social justice even harder, and the law has never been an even playing field. With the Supreme Court burrowing ever deeper into Trump’s pocket, it is unclear how strong the law will continue to be as a tool in these battles.

But Judge Young seemed to urge anyone reading his ruling to continue the fight: “neither our Constitution nor laws enforce themselves, and [Trump] can do most anything until an aggrieved person or entity will stand up and say [to] him ‘Nay,’ i.e. take him to court.”