A Reagan-Appointed Federal Judge Denounces the Administration's 'Unconstitutional Conspiracy' to Deport Pro-Palestinian Students
We’ve been warning that the Trump administration’s attempt to deport foreign students for their political views is an attack on the First Amendment. Now a Reagan-appointed federal judge in the case is going so far as to denounce it as an “unconstitutional conspiracy.”
The Washington Post reports:
In remarks laced with outrage and disbelief, U.S. District Judge William Young said Donald Trump and top officials have a “fearful approach” to freedom of speech that would seek to “exclude from participation everyone who doesn’t agree with them.”
Young, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan, leveled the searing critique during a hearing in Boston to determine the appropriate remedies for the administration’s detentions of pro-Palestinian students last year. The judge had ruled in September that senior administration officials engaged in an illegal effort to arrest and deport noncitizen students based on their activism.
On Thursday, he again denounced the administration’s conduct in unusually stark terms. “Talking straight here,” he said. “The big problem in this case is that the Cabinet secretaries and, ostensibly, the president of the United States, are not honoring the First Amendment.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio engaged in an “unconstitutional conspiracy” to deprive people of their rights, Young said. …
The 2025 trial revealed the machinery behind the Trump administration’s campus crackdown. Senior administration officials directed personnel at DHS who normally analyze transnational criminal networks to instead produce reports on students involved in pro-Palestinian protests, one official testified.
None of this is subtle, and it is revealing that when any of this administration’s actions is brought before a court and analyzed by someone whose outlook was formed before the madness of the Trump era—whatever their previous partisan loyalties—it is met with outraged disbelief.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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