Trump administration's crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus activists faces federal trial in Boston

Plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration campaign of arresting and deporting faculty and students who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations argued Monday it was an orchestrated effort that has stifled free speech at universities around the country.

The lawsuit, filed by several university associations against President Donald Trump and members of his administration, is one of the first to go to trial. Plaintiffs want U.S. District Judge William Young to rule the policy violates the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act, a law that governs the process by which federal agencies develop and issue regulations.

“Not since the McCarthy era have immigrants been the target of such intense repression for lawful political speech,” Ramya Krishnan, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute, told the court. “The policy creates a cloud of fear over university communities, and it is at war with the First Amendment. The First Amendment forecloses viewpoint discrimination; it forecloses retaliation; and it forecloses government threats meant to coerce silence.”

In response, lawyers for the government argued that no such policy exists and that the government is enforcing immigration laws legally and is doing so to protect national security.

“There is no policy to revoke visas on the basis of protected speech,” Victoria Santora told the court. “The evidence presented at this trial will show that plaintiffs are challenging nothing more than government enforcement of immigration laws.”

Since Trump took office, the U.S. government has used its immigration enforcement powers to crack down on international students and scholars at several American universities.

Trump and other officials have accused protesters and others of being “pro-Hamas,” referring to the Palestinian militant group that attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Many protesters have said they were speaking out against Israel’s actions in the war.

Plaintiffs single out several activists by name, including Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, who was released last month after spending 104 days in federal immigration detention. Khalil has become a symbol of Trump ’s clampdown on campus protests.

The lawsuit also references Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was released in May from Louisiana immigration detention. She spent six weeks in detention after she was arrested walking on the street of a Boston suburb. She claims she was illegally detained following an op-ed she co-wrote last year that criticized the school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza.

The plaintiffs also accused the Trump administration of supplying names to universities whom they wanted to target and launching a social media surveillance program. They used Trump’s own words in which he said after Khalil’s arrest that his was the “first arrest of many to come.”

The first witness in the case, Megan Hyska, a green card holder from Canada who is a philosophy professor at Northwestern University, detailed how the efforts to deport Khalil and Ozturk prompted her to significantly scale back her activism.

Before Trump took office, she had supported student encampments at Northwestern, had taken part in scores of protests against police brutality and in support of Palestinians and had been active in the Chicago chapter of Democratic Socialists of America. But after Khalil and Ozturk were detained, Hyska testified, she refrained from publishing an opinion piece critical of the Trump administration, chose not to take part in some anti-Trump protests and has decided against traveling back to Canada.

“It became apparent to me, after I became aware of a couple of high profile detentions of political activists, that my engaging in public political dissent would potentially endanger my immigration status,” Hyska said.

A government lawyer tried to undermine her testimony, confirming that she had not been contacted by anyone from the government asking her to stop her activism. The lawyer also referenced two letters Hyska had signed after the arrest of the activists to suggest she continued to be politically active — prompting Hyska to say those letters were directed to Northwestern administrators, not the general public.

The trial continues Tuesday with several more witnesses who are expected to testify about the impact the immigration campaign has had on their activism.