Professor groups sue feds, claim Khalil arrest and visa actions created 'climate of fear' on campuses

Several faculty groups at prominent universities, including Harvard, are suing the Trump administration over its recent efforts to arrest, detain or deport pro-Palestinian campus activists.

In a lawsuit filed in federal district court in Boston Tuesday morning, the professor associations argue the government's policies have led to a "climate of fear and repression" and chilled speech at higher education institutions across the country.

Represented by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, the suit is joined by the NYU, Harvard and Rutgers University chapters of the American Association of University Professors, as well as the nonprofit Middle East Studies Association.

The suit cited the high-profile arrest this month of Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent U.S. resident who graduated from Columbia where he was a pro-Palestinian negotiator during last spring's contentious anti-war protests.

The professor groups' lawsuit claimed federal agencies' actions against Khalil “have sent chills through the community of noncitizen students and faculty on campuses around the country, causing some to pull out of academic conferences, stay home from protests, and withdraw from other forms of public advocacy and engagement.”

U.S. Immigration and Enforcement officials are holding Khalil at a detainment facility in Louisiana and threatening to deport him. Khalil holds a green card and is married to a pregnant American citizen. This week, his lawyers said the government is claiming without evidence that he is a Hamas sympathizer who withheld information in his application for legal residency about previous work for a United Nations agency that helps Palestinian refugees.

“The Trump administration is going after international scholars and students who speak their minds about Palestine, but make no mistake: they won't stop there," Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and a media studies professor at Rutgers, said in a statement.

"They’ll come next for those who teach the history of slavery or who provide gender-affirming health care or who research climate change or who counsel students about their reproductive choices," he added. "We all have to draw a line together—as the old labor movement slogan says: an injury to one is an injury to all.”

The lawsuit seeks a declaration from a federal judge that the Trump administration's "ideological-deportation policy" violates the First Amendment and an injunction against the federal agencies that would prevent them from carrying out further "investigation, surveillance, arrest, detention [and] deportation" of university members.

The 49-page complaint included observations from faculty members — some anonymously — at universities around the country. Among the patterns they described were that noncitizen faculty have: stopped attending political protests; cut back on public appearances on advocacy matters related to Israel and Palestine; refrained from public writing or scholarship on the region or attempted to purge earlier writings on the topic, including blog posts or social media posts.

The lawsuit also claimed that beyond faculty, many students are skipping classes or avoiding participation in discussions.

A handful of the anonymous observations came from professors at "a university in the Northeast," but the complaint did not specify which schools the faculty members work for.

One AAUP member, identified as a lecturer who studies race and migration, said in the suit that they've stopped assigning course materials about Israel and Gaza. The complaint added that some noncitizen members of AAUP were too fearful to share anonymous descriptions of their experiences.

Some professors were named in the lawsuit. Several of them highlighted that their teachings have been undermined because of what they see as the government's chilling effect on their colleagues' speech. It is, in their view, limiting their ability to hear from or engage with silenced faculty members.

The identified faculty members teach in disciplines that span international human rights law, history, English and comparative literature, anthropology and classics, according to the complaint.

Vincent Brown, a professor of history and African American studies at Harvard who sits on the executive committee of the school's AAUP chapter, told WBUR that the threat of intimidation against noncitizen faculty and students is taking a broader toll across the campus.

"If  I can't hear from those people, if I'm not free to associate with those people who I can learn from, who I can teach, who can learn from each other, then I feel like my own rights of association and speech have been abridged," he said in an interview.

Maya Jasanoff, a professor of history at Harvard who focuses on the British empire, offered her experience to the lawsuit. She alleged students are “reluctant to speak publicly about politics and world affairs out of concern that they will be targeted” for deportation.

Kirsten Weld, a Harvard history professor and president of the college's AAUP chapter, said in the suit that many of her noncitizen colleagues and students “have retreated from ordinary university life" and have “devoted significant attention and resources to preparing for potential immigration consequences that may result from their past expressive activities.”

In an interview, Weld spoke more about what's changing on campus and for her colleagues, saying there has been a noticeable "chilling effect" on discourse.

" If you are in the United States on a student visa or on a green card, you are not going to stick your neck out right now and speak about a topic that is disfavored by the current government," she said.

The Trump administration has revoked the visas of at least three other students and faculty beyond Khalil, according to the filing: a Columbia doctoral student from India who is also an adjunct assistant professor of urban planning at NYU; a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown’s school of foreign service; and a doctoral student in Africana studies at Cornell.

With reporting from WBUR's Emily Piper-Vallillo.