A federal judge Thursday decried what he said were
“breathtaking” constitutional violations
by senior Trump administration officials
and called the president
an “authoritarian” who expects everyone in the executive branch to
“toe the line absolutely.”
In remarks laced with outrage and disbelief,
U.S. District Judge #William #Young said Donald Trump and top officials have a
“fearful approach”
to freedom of speech that would seek to
“exclude from participation everyone who doesn’t agree with them.”
Young, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan,
leveled the searing critique during a hearing in Boston to determine the appropriate remedies for the administration’s ⚠️detentions of
pro-Palestinian students last year.
The judge had ruled in September that senior administration officials engaged in an 👉 illegal effort to arrest and deport noncitizen students based on their activism. On Thursday, he again denounced the administration’s conduct in unusually stark terms.
“Talking straight here,” he said.
“The big problem in this case is that the cabinet secretaries
and ostensibly,
the president of the United States,
are not honoring the First Amendment.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem
and Secretary of State Marco Rubio
engaged in an
“unconstitutional conspiracy”
to deprive people of their rights,
Young said.
“The secretary of state,” he noted,
his voice full of incredulity,
“the senior cabinet officer in our history involved in this.”
Spokespersons for the White House,
Noem and Rubio did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, last year called Young a “craven” judge who was “smearing and demonizing federal law enforcement.”
The government actions at the core of the case date to early March,
when the Trump administration launched a campaign to detain and deport noncitizen students at U.S. universities
who had been active in opposing Israel’s war in Gaza.
Though not accused of any crime,
those arrested spent weeks confined in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities,
at times hundreds of miles from where they lived,
before being released on bail.
The plaintiffs in the case are the American Association of University Professors
and the Middle East Studies Association.
The groups of scholars accused the administration of having an unconstitutional policy of deporting people based on their political views,
a policy intended to chill the free-speech rights of their members.
The trial last summer focused on the targeting of five noncitizen students and scholars: #Mahmoud #Khalil, #Yunseo #Chung and #Mohsen #Mahdawi, who were students at Columbia University;
#Rumeysa #Ozturk,
a graduate student at Tufts University;
and #Badar #Khan #Suri, a postdoctoral scholar at Georgetown University.
All were arrested except Chung,
who obtained a restraining order before ICE could find her.
The other four were released on the orders of federal judges,
but the Trump administration is still trying to deport them.
⭐️On Thursday, an appellate court in Philadelphia overturned a
Ruling lower-court ruling in Khalil’s case on jurisdictional grounds,
⛔️raising the possibility that he could be rearrested.
The president and other officials hailed last year’s detentions as part of a fight against "antisemitism", alleging without presenting evidence that the targeted students promoted violence or were pro-Hamas.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/01/15/protesters-trump-administration-free-speech-violations/
