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.”
