US judge rules against Trump’s attempt to deport pro-Palestinian students | Migration news
A federal judge criticized the Trump administration for attempting to infringe on the free speech rights of foreign students.
In California on Friday, U.S. District Judge Noel Wise criticized the U.S. Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) after the agencies attempted to deport noncitizens on the grounds of protected speech.
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“Plainly stated, in the United States, freedom of speech belongs to the people,” Wise said in his 90-page decision. “It’s not the government’s responsibility.”
Wise, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden, added that, in the United States, speaking openly about the government and its leaders was a testament to the health of the country’s democracy.
“That force diminishes when members of our society, both citizens and non-citizens, must self-censor and ‘behave’ or suffer government retaliation,” he said.
The ruling focused on how the second Trump administration revoked visas and detained international students studying in the United States after they participated in Palestinian advocacy activities.
The arrests began with Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate of Columbia University, in March 2025.
Columbia had been an epicenter of the student protest movement, and Khalil, a graduate student and permanent resident of the United States, had emerged as a a key negotiator for student groups.
Khalil, who is fighting deportation in a separate case, praised Saturday’s ruling in a social media post.
“No one should be afraid to speak out in defense of Palestine,” Khalil wrote in X.
Arrests like Khalil’s formed the basis of the lawsuit against US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, one of the defendants in the case. In August 2025, Stanford University’s independent student newspaper, the Stanford Daily, filed a complaint claiming that some of its non-citizen writers had chosen not to cover pro-Palestinian protests due to the administration’s actions.
Two anonymous plaintiffs also joined the lawsuit, identifying themselves as foreign citizens with no criminal records. They said they, too, felt the need to censor themselves for fear of losing their student visas.
However, the Trump administration has pointed to the Immigration and Nationality Act as justification for its deportation efforts.
Part of that law states that the secretary of state can “exclude” foreign citizens from the country if their presence could cause “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
But critics have argued that the rule is largely untested in court and does not supersede the First Amendment of the Constitution, which protects free speech.
In his ruling, Wise chastised Rubio for what he described as a “standards-free” application of his visa revocation policy.
“The record reveals a clear pattern in the enforcement actions the government has taken to revoke noncitizen visas since March 2025,” the judge wrote. “The secretary revokes visas when noncitizens criticize the government or the causes or people it favors. This exemplifies ‘seriously discriminatory enforcement.'”
Conor Fitzpatrick, an attorney for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Free Expression (FIRE), the nonprofit that filed the lawsuit, hailed the ruling as a victory for First Amendment rights.
“Today’s ruling demonstrates that freedom of expression is not a privilege, but the inalienable right of every man, woman and child,” Fitzpatrick said in a statement.
The Trump administration has also faced other setbacks in its student deportation campaign.
In September 2025, for example, a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that U.S. officials had violated the First Amendment when they attempted to detain and deport non-citizen students and academics for defending their pro-Palestine position.
The case had been brought by a coalition of educational groups, which argued that the deportation policy had created “a climate of repression and fear on university campuses.”
Al Jazeera has contacted the State Department and DHS for comment.
