A lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s effort to deport foreign students over pro-Palestinian views goes to trial in a Massachusetts federal court on Monday, where the government for the first time will need to defend its extraordinary position that it can deport noncitizens over their political speech.
The case was brought by the national American Association of University Professors (AAUP); its Harvard, Rutgers and New York University chapters; and the Middle East Studies Association (Mesa) following the arrest and detention of several noncitizen students and scholars who have spoken out on Palestinian rights. The government has claimed the authority to deport noncitizens who have committed no crimes but whose presence it deems poses a threat to US foreign policy.
Witnesses testified on Monday about the chilling effect of the Trump administration’s harsh clampdowns on university campuses, with professors describing how they have censored their own speech and activities despite Trump’s long insistence that under him Americans will have a robust first amendment.
“What the public and what the court heard from our witnesses today is about the powerful chill that the government’s policy has cast over university communities,” Ramya Krishnan, lead counsel for the plaintiffs told reporters outside the courthouse on Monday. “Noncitizen students and faculty on our university campuses today are terrified.”
The case is the first of half-dozen legal challenges to the Trump administration’s sweeping crackdown on universities to make it to trial, with civil rights and education advocates asking the judge to declare the “ideological-deportation policy” unconstitutional and unlawful.
Those arrested as part of the government’s promised campaign against pro-Palestinian foreign students have all been released from immigration detention, with the last of them – Mahmoud Khalil – freed on 20 June. But they all continue to fight against efforts to deport them. Other students left the US or went into hiding to avoid arrest.
The lawsuit argues that the Trump administration’s policy has created a climate of fear on university campuses, forcing “many noncitizen students and faculty into silence”.
The complaint includes testimony from several AAUP and Mesa members who say they have scrubbed their social media profiles of posts about Israel and Palestine, even when that is their area of expertise; declined to teach courses, assign readings or publish work related to Palestine; and turned down or withdrawn from opportunities to speak at academic conferences and other events. Some said they stopped traveling internationally, attending protests and signing their names to public statements.
One of the witnesses, Nadje Al-Ali, a German anthropologist and former director of the Center for Middle East Studies at Brown University, said she had been working on an academic article making a “feminist critique of Hamas” but dropped it after Khalil’s arrest “because expressing any nuanced view related to Israel and Palestine feels too dangerous to her”, according to a pre-trial brief submitted to the court. Al-Ali also turned down a fellowship at the German Orient-Institute in Lebanon “due to the risk of being denied re-entry based on her association with pro-Palestinian speech”.
After the arrest of the Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk over an op-ed she co-authored about Gaza, Megan Hyska, a philosophy professor at Northwestern University originally from Canada, decided not to publish an op-ed she had written about organising resistance to the Trump administration’s policies “because she feared that it would raise her profile and put her at risk of arrest, detention and deportation”, according to the brief. Although she had previously served in leadership roles in the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, Hyska declined to pursue further positions for the same reason.
Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropology professor at Columbia University, said that the detention of Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, both graduate students at the school, also harmed US citizens such as her because “the loss of their specific voices significantly impaired conversations about Palestine on campus”, according to the brief. El-Haj, who is a co-director of Columbia’s Center for Palestine Studies (CPS), said that she canceled planned events at the center out of fears they would become “the target of immigration raids or bring participants in CPS events to [Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s] attention”.
Both noncitizen and citizen scholars are expected to testify at the trial. The judge in the case, William G Young, explicitly warned the government against any attempt at “retribution”, and cautioned that any effort at witness intimidation would amount to “obstruction of justice”. Young, a Reagan appointee, recently ruled in a separate case that the Trump administration’s termination of more than $1bn in research grants was “void and illegal”, and represented unlawful “racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community”.
The US Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment, but in a court filing denied there was a policy at all and challenged the court’s jurisdiction over the matter.
“[N]o such policy exists,” the government’s attorneys wrote. The AAUP’s case, they added, “rests on a basic misunderstanding of the first amendment, which under binding supreme court precedent applies differently in the immigration context than it otherwise does domestically”.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs maintain that the targeting of noncitizens over pro-Palestinian speech amounts to viewpoint-based discrimination and violates the first amendment, which they argue protects speech by noncitizens as well.
“This case raises the question of what the first amendment means today in the United States,” said Elora Mukherjee, a lawyer and the director of Columbia Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic. “Can the Trump administration carry out large-scale arrests, detentions and deportations of noncitizens, students and faculty members who participate in pro-Palestinian protests and other protected first amendment activities?”
Another lawsuit brought by the AAUP against the Trump administration’s cutting of $400m worth of federal funding to Columbia University was dismissed last month in a New York federal court, with the judge in that case ruling that the AAUP had “no standing” to bring the case. (The government tried to argue the AAUP has no standing in this case either, but Young disagreed.)
So far, Harvard University is the only school to sue the Trump administration over actions it has taken against higher education. But with most universities wary of getting in Trump’s crosshairs, academic associations have stepped up, with the AAUP filing four lawsuits so far.
The trial represents the first time courts will examine the administration’s approach to what critics call “ideological deportation” – a practice that has led several students to flee the country or go into hiding to avoid arrest. The outcome could determine whether the government can continue using immigration enforcement to suppress political speech on university campuses.
“Not since the McCarthy era have we seen immigrants subject to such an intense campaign of speech repression,” Krishnan said. “We haven’t seen ideological deportations of this kind since the McCarthy era, when the government attempted to deport members of the Communist party.”
• This article was amended on 7 July 2025. An earlier version misspelled the surname of Elora Mukherjee.
