University professors sued a host of federal officials on Tuesday, alleging that the Trump administration is violating the First Amendment and creating a “climate of fear and repression” on campus by seeking to deport pro-Palestinian activists.
“The Trump administration is going after international scholars and students who speak their minds about Palestine, but make no mistake: they won't stop there,” reads a statement from Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, one of the groups that brought the suit. “They'll come next for those who teach the history of slavery or who provide gender-affirming health care or who research climate change or who counsel students about their reproductive choices.”
The complaint, filed alongside the Knight First Amendment and a string of academic organizations in Massachusetts federal court, alleges that the administration is seeking to deport people for lawful, constitutionally protected political expression around the Israel-Hamas conflict.
They allege this stance has meant “terrorizing students and faculty for their exercise of First Amendment rights in the past, intimidating them from exercising those rights now, and silencing political viewpoints that the government disfavors.”
It points to comments from Trump officials like the president, who has said he will deport “all” non-citizens who joined in campus Palestine protests, and a top Homeland Security official who repeatedly declined in a recent NPR interview to answer whether any form of protest against the government could land someone in immigration detention.
The lawsuit also describes member academics scrubbing their social media profiles and course syllabi of any mention of Israel and Palestine, for fear that non-citizen scholars could end up arrested by immigration officials.
The Independent has contacted the entities named in the suit for comment.
“This Department makes no apologies for its efforts to defend President Trump’s agenda in court and protect Jewish Americans from vile antisemitism,” a Justice Department spokesperson told The Independent.
“It is a privilege to be granted a visa to live and study in the United States of America,” added a spokeperson for the Department of Homeland Security. “When you advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country.”
The administration has pursued deportation cases against a variety of non-citizen student activists and academics in recent weeks.
It has invoked an obscure, controversial portion of immigration law to remove legal U.S. permanent residents, including recent Columbia grad and protest leaderMahmoud Khalil, and current Columbia student Yunseo Chung, whose lawyers say she only casually attended protests and had never faced any major campus discipline before becoming a target of a multi-agency arrest effort.
The administration is also pursuing deportation against Georgetown scholar Badar Khan Suri and Cornell PhD Momodou Taal, who alleges immigration officials tried to arrest him amid his lawsuit against the Trump administration’s executive orders on immigration and antisemitism.
The government maintains Taal’s visa was revoked over his past record on campus before the lawsuit began, and has accused Khalil of failing to disclose past diplomatic and humanitarian work on his immigration forms.
The Trump administration has vowed that these recent cases are the beginning of a larger wave of removal operations.
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