Judge deals blow to Trump moves to deport pro-Palestinian activists

Highlights:

• Ruling focuses on visa revocations and deportation proceedings begun in March 2025 over pro-Palestinian campus advocacy
• Suit by Stanford's student newspaper says student visa holders self-censored coverage
• Judge criticizes 'downward spiral' under Trump administration

A federal judge on Friday ruled that laws that President Donald Trump's administration used to cancel visas and initiate deportation proceedings against non-citizen college students based on their pro-Palestinian advocacy and criticism of Israel are unconstitutional.

US District Judge Noel Wise in San Jose, California, in a blistering ruling chastised the US State Department and US Department of Homeland Security for how they had deployed provisions of federal immigration law to target non-citizens for deportation for expressing views they wanted to suppress.

The judge, an appointee of Democratic President Joe Biden, said that in the United States, free speech, including the freedom to criticise the government and its leaders, was evidence of the strength of the country's democracy.

"That strength is diminished when members of our society – citizens and noncitizens alike – must self-censor and 'behave' or suffer the government's retaliation," she said.

The State Department and DHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Wise's ruling focused on how the Trump administration, from March 2025, began revoking visas and detaining non-citizens who engaged in pro-Palestinian advocacy on campus, starting with the arrest of Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, who is fighting separately to avoid being deported.

Those arrests formed the basis of a lawsuit that was filed in August 2025 by Stanford University's student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, which alleged that some of its writers with student visas had refrained from covering pro-Palestinian student protests and topics related to the Middle East conflict as a result of the administration's policies.

The newspaper's lawyers argued that two provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act that the administration relied upon to cancel student visas and initiate deportation proceedings violated the US Constitution's First and Fifth Amendments as applied to constitutionally protected speech.

Those laws allowed Secretary of State Marco Rubio to render non-citizens deportable if he personally determined someone's action "compromises a compelling foreign policy interest" and allowed him to revoke someone's visa at his discretion.

Wise agreed with the newspaper, saying that when a non-citizen's speech is the reason behind a visa revocation and deportation determination, "the government is singling out that speech for disfavoured treatment based on its viewpoint or content."

Conor Fitzpatrick, whose group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression represented the student newspaper, in a statement said the ruling "proves that free speech isn't a privilege, but the inalienable right of every man, woman, and child."

The ruling was similar to a decision last year by Boston-based US District Judge William Young, who similarly found the administration had acted unconstitutionally by adopting a policy of revoking visas, arresting, detaining and deporting foreign students and faculty engaged in pro-Palestinian advocacy.

Wise in her ruling expressed concern the administration had moved on to target people for expressing other types of views it disfavoured, saying eventually the "targets may include anyone in the United States who exercises their freedom of speech to simply express opinions the government does not like."

"This downward spiral is antithetical to our Constitution that recognizes our right to speak freely," she wrote. "Here you can simultaneously hate the content of a person's speech and love the country that cherishes the freedom to allow it."