1 of 3 | Pro-Palestinian protesters rally in Lower Manhattan in New York City in March. A federal judge ruled Tuesday that the Trump administration tried to chill pro-Palestinian protests by threatening to deport foreign students. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI | License Photo
Sept. 30 (UPI) -- A federal judge ruled Tuesday that Trump administration officials used deportations of foreign students with pro-Palestinian views to squelch the free speech rights of non-citizens and discourage campus protests.
U.S. District Court Judge William Young's ruling is in response to a lawsuit that raised constitutional alarms about the detentions and threatened deportations of Columbia University's Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts University's Rumeysa Ozturk, both of whom had participated in protests against Israel's military campaigns in Gaza.
The pair of graduate students had become the public faces of the Trump administration's efforts to curb what it has described as disruptive activities by foreign students that run contrary to U.S. interests.
In his sharply worded ruling, Young wrote that evidence presented during the bench trial clearly showed that Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and the Secretary of State Marco Rubio used their authority to "intentionally to chill the rights to freedom of speech and peacefully to assemble" of non-citizen scholars and students studying in the United States.
