A federal judge has delivered an absolutely scorching rebuke of the Trump administration, ruling that their policy of targeting foreign students for supporting Palestinian rights is a blatant violation of the US Constitution’s First Amendment. US District Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee in Massachusetts, didn’t mince words in his decision, declaring that non-citizens lawfully present here “unequivocally ‘yes, they do'” have “the same free speech rights as the rest of us.”
This is huge, and Judge Young’s 161-page decision is more than just a legal ruling—it’s a dramatic takedown of the administration’s approach to dissent. He found that top government officials, specifically including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, “deliberately and with purposeful aforethought, did so concert their actions and those of their two departments intentionally to chill the rights to freedom of speech and peacefully to assemble.”
The core of the problem here, as the lawsuit brought by groups like the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) alleged, was an illegal “ideological deportation policy” aimed at removing non-citizen campus activists for their political views, per NBC News.
Trump just found out you can’t take away someone’s freedoms, even if they look different
The evidence presented in court only made the administration look worse. It turns out that a majority of the names flagged to Homeland Security for potential deportation came from the mysterious online doxxing database, Canary Mission, which compiles information on students and professors who’ve expressed anti-Israel or antisemitic viewpoints.
This means the government was using unverified, third-party dossiers from a secretive, pro-Israel group to decide who should be targeted for visa revocation and potential deportation. The policy led to high-profile arrests, including Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, who were detained by masked, plainclothes agents. You’d think the government had bigger, more actual security threats to worry about than a master’s student writing an op-ed.
Senior U.S. District Judge William Young rules that the Trump administration's policy targeting pro-Palestinian students for deportation violated the First Amendment. https://t.co/RW3xIqBThD
— TheSteadyState (@steadystate2025) September 30, 2025
Judge Young wasn’t just ruling on the students, though; he included a full-on, 13-page indictment of the current President’s second term so far. He didn’t hold back, portraying President Trump as a bully who seeks retribution for speech he dislikes. “The Constitution, our civil laws, regulations, mores, customs, practices, courtesies—all of it; the President simply ignores it all when he takes it into his head to act,” Young wrote. This “palpable misunderstanding that the government simply cannot seek retribution for speech he disdains poses a great threat to Americans’ freedom of speech,” he added.
To really drive home the point about the current political climate, Judge Young even included a threatening postcard he had received, which read, “Trump has pardons and tanks… what do you have?” His response, published right at the top of the ruling, was simply that he had “nothing but my sense of duty.” Why can’t more judges be this serious about defending the Constitution?
Jameel Jaffer, executive director at the Knight First Amendment Institute, who represented the students, called the ruling “historic.” He said, “If the First Amendment means anything, it means the government can’t imprison people simply because it disagrees with their political views.” Honestly, it’s about time someone in the judiciary pushed back this hard. It feels like night and day compared to the silence on this issue before. Todd Wolfson, President of the AAUP, called the administration’s actions a “betrayal of American values” that was meant “to intimidate and silence anyone who dares oppose them.”
