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PALESTINIAN RIGHTS AND FREE SPEECH RIGHTS ARE CLOSELY LINKED  
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Lori Allen
October 26, 2025
Jacobin
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_ A recent successful court case brought by university professors
against the Trump administration’s ideological deportations is an
important win for supporters of Palestinian liberation and opponents
of rising authoritarianism in the US. _

The recent court ruling against Donald Trump’s ideological
deportations is a clear defense of the First Amendment’s protections
for free expression for all legal US residents, including and
specifically for those opposing Israel’s brutality in Gaza., Selcuk
Acar / Anadolu via Getty Images

 

his 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
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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 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… 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.

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 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
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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, “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 . . . . he [hypothetical or alleged]
conduct of the State of Israel — involv war crimes, as involv
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.

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.

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
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and Australia
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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
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a variety of arenas: degrading the judiciary
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on law firms
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starving public, independent media
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and squeezing civic groups
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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
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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 can do most anything until an aggrieved person or entity will
stand up and say him ‘Nay,’ i.e. take him to court.”

_LORI ALLEN is a writer and anthropologist based in London and the
author, most recently, of A History of False Hope: Investigative
Commissions in Palestine._

_JACOBIN is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist
perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine
is released quarterly and reaches 75,000 subscribers, in addition to a
web audience of over 3,000,000 a month._

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* Israel
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* Palestine
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* United States
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* law
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* repression
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* Free Speech
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* Deportation
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* Immigration
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* Donald Trump
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* Department of Homeland Security
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