A prominent First Amendment attorney who went to bat for right-wing figures against Joe Biden’s administration is now preparing to take on what she calls “the most egregious free-speech violations of my lifetime” under Donald Trump.
Jenin Younes, who previously represented Trump allies who opposed Biden-era COVID-19 mitigation efforts, told The Washington Post that the Trump administration’s targeting of Palestinian student activists and immigrants’ social media accounts is “way worse than anything Biden did.”
“This is completely insane,” she told the newspaper.
Younes’ skepticism of COVID “lockdowns” and mask requirements at the height of the pandemic had attracted support from Republicans and fringe figures roundly rejected by public health officials, including Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorf, who both now work in the Department of Health and Human Services under conspiracy theorist Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
She had represented a group of Republican attorneys general in a lawsuit against the Biden administration, which was accused of violating First Amendment rights by allegedly colluding with social media platforms to suppress COVID mis- and disinformation.
Younes, who was a lawyer at the libertarian New Civil Liberties Alliance at the time, fought the Biden administration up to the Supreme Court, where the justices’ 6-3 decision in 2024 determined that social media companies’ policies surrounding misinformation had predated any alleged pressure from the Biden administration.
The justices also found that plaintiffs had failed to show that their posts were censored as a result of anything Biden-era officials did.
She still believes the justices got the decision wrong, she told The Post, and believes the ruling could enable Trump’s own “jawboning” of private companies and universities.
Now, as the national legal director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Younes is preparing First Amendment litigation over what she sees is more overt threats to the constitutionally protected speech — including high-profile attempts to deport international students for speaking out against Israel’s war in Gaza.
In one of his first acts in office, Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” with a pledge to end what he claims was the Biden administration’s attempts to suppress speech “under the guise of combatting ‘misinformation.’”
“Nobody ever says, ‘We’re censoring protected speech,’” she told The Post. “They say it’s misinformation, or [in] support of terrorism, or it’s antithetical to American values.”
Younes, who was born in Saudi Arabia to a Palestinian father and an American mother, said she grew up listening to her father’s stories of oppression under Israeli occupation. Her maternal grandfather was born to a Jewish family and had fled Nazi Germany.
The arrests of university students Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk and Mohsen Mahdawi sparked international outrage over the Trump administration’s attempts to crush dissent against Israel’s devastating campaign in Gaza. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said he “proudly” revoked hundreds of student visas over campus activism, leading to several high-profile arrests of international scholars who were detained and threatened with removal from the country.
Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student, was released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention after more than three months. Ozturk, a Tufts University doctoral student who was arrested for co-writing an anti-war op-ed in a student newspaper, was released from detention after more than six weeks.
Immigration authorities are now reviewing immigrants’ social media accounts for what they consider “antisemitic activity” that could be used as evidence to deny them legal status in the United States. The new screening measures follow similar guidance from other agencies as the Trump administration targets dissent against Israel’s war in Gaza, which officials have broadly characterized as antisemitic.
“Once Trump took office, I wanted to challenge what I saw as the most egregious free-speech violations of my lifetime,” Younes told The Post.
While some campus demonstrations got “out of control,” the administration is using protests as pretext to target students and bring academic institutions to heel, she told the newspaper.
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee announced Younes as its new legal director this month, pointing to her legal battle at the Supreme Court.
“ADC exists to defend constitutionally protected civil rights, and that starts with defending speech,” the group’s director Abed Ayoub said in a statement. “Jenin brings the resolve and courtroom experience we need to push back against attempts to criminalize or civilly punish dissent. We will meet those attempts in court, in legislatures, and in the public square.”
The group will “not allow anyone to launder viewpoint discrimination through civil rights law,” Younes said in a statement through the group.
“When officials or courts start treating anti‑Zionism as antisemitism, they punish dissent and collapse the distinction between ideas and identity,” she said. “The Constitution does not permit that. We intend to defend that line in every forum that matters.”
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