US judge to restrict Trump efforts to deport anti-Israel campus activists

A US federal judge says he will issue an order designed to prevent President Donald Trump’s administration from exacting “retribution” against academics who challenged its arresting, detaining and deporting non-citizen, pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel activists on US college campuses.

US District Judge William Young speaks at a hearing in Boston federal court, after finding in September that the US departments of State and Homeland Security violated the US Constitution’s First Amendment by chilling the free speech of non-citizen academics on college campuses.

“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,” Young says.

Young, who was appointed by Republican former president Ronald Reagan and has criticized Trump’s other actions in the past, calls the administration’s actions “appalling,” and says it has “a fearful approach to freedom.”

The judge says he will limit the reach of his order to members of academic associations, including the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association, which challenged the administration’s actions.

Those groups had sought an order blocking the administration’s practices nationally. Young calls their proposal “overbroad,” but says a “sanction” is needed to remedy what he concludes was a conspiracy by top officials under Trump.

“We cast around the word ‘authoritarian,'” Young says. “I don’t, in this context, treat that in a pejorative sense, and I use it carefully, but it’s fairly clear that this president believes, as an authoritarian, that when he speaks, everyone, everyone in Article II is going to toe the line absolutely.”

Young says he will instead issue an order establishing a presumption that any change to the immigration status of those groups’ members is in retribution for their participation in the case and require the government to prove in court it is seeking to deport them for other, “appropriate” reasons.

The White House does not immediately respond to a request for comment.