Federal judge in Boston warns Trump against addressing the immigration status of students who sue him

A federal judge in Boston has ordered the Trump administration to stop arresting or deporting international students and academic faculty involved in a First Amendment lawsuit against the federal government.

U.S. District Judge William G. Young ruled Thursday that the government must clearly prove that any arrest, detention or change in immigration status is based on a legitimate reason unrelated to retaliation, a U.S. court said. Boston Sphere report.

Young wrote that any attempt to change the immigration status of plaintiffs in the landmark case against the Trump administration will be considered punishment for speaking out — unless the government can provide strong evidence that the action was due to a crime, an expired visa, or some other valid reason.

The lawsuit was filed by university faculty and academic groups, including chapters at Harvard, NYU and Rutgers, after international students were arrested for pro-Palestinian activism. It names President Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and ICE Director Todd Lyons as suspects.

In September, Young ruled that the federal government had violated the freedom of speech of students who were targeted for arrest and possible deportation after their public support of the Palestinians in Gaza.

One such case was that of Tufts University Ph.D. student Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish citizen who was taken from a street in Somerville by plainclothes officers in March. She was held in Louisiana for six weeks and has since had her immigration record reinstated.

In his September decision, Young wrote that noncitizens lawfully present in the United States are entitled to the same free speech protections as citizens.

“This case — perhaps the most important to ever fall under the jurisdiction of this district court — starkly presents the question of whether noncitizens legally here in the United States actually have the same free speech rights as the rest of us,” Young wrote. “The Court answers this constitutional question unequivocally with ‘yes, they do.’”

Speak with WGBHKirsten Weld, a professor of history at Harvard and president of the university chapter of the American Association of University Professors — a plaintiff in the case — called Thursday’s ruling “historic.”

“First, Judge Young affirmed unequivocally and beyond any doubt that non-citizens lawfully present here in the United States have the same free speech rights as everyone else. So there is no double standard,” Weld told the newspaper.

“The second reason is that Judge Young found that the federal government clearly and unconstitutionally pursued a policy of facial discrimination against pro-Palestinian speech in particular,” she said.

The Trump administration is expected to appeal both Young’s ruling in September and his latest order protecting the plaintiffs’ immigration status.