revocation

BOSTON — The Trump administration violated the Constitution when it targeted non-U.S. citizens for deportation solely for supporting Palestinians and criticizing Israel, a federal judged said Tuesday in a scathing ruling directly and sharply criticizing President Trump and his policies as serious threats to free speech.

U.S. District Judge William Young in Boston agreed with several university associations that the policy they described as ideological deportation violates the 1st Amendment as well as the Administrative Procedure Act, a law governing how federal agencies develop and issue regulations. Young also found the policy was “arbitrary or capricious because it reverses prior policy without reasoned explanation.”

“This case — perhaps the most important ever to fall within the jurisdiction of this district court — squarely presents the issue whether non-citizens lawfully present here in [the] United States actually have the same free speech rights as the rest of us. The Court answers this Constitutional question unequivocally ‘yes, they do,’” Young, a nominee of Republican President Reagan, wrote.

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Plaintiffs in the case welcomed the ruling.

“The Trump administration’s attempt to deport students for their political views is an assault on the Constitution and a betrayal of American values,” said Todd Wolfson, president of the American Assn. of University Professors union. “This trial exposed their true aim: to intimidate and silence anyone who dares oppose them. If we fail to fight back, Trump’s thought police won’t stop at pro-Palestinian voices—they will come for anyone who speaks out.”

The ruling came after a trial during which lawyers for the associations presented witnesses who testified that the Trump administration had launched a coordinated effort to target students and scholars who had criticized Israel or showed sympathy for Palestinians.

“Not since the McCarthy era have immigrants been the target of such intense repression for lawful political speech,” Ramya Krishnan, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute, told the court. “The policy creates a cloud of fear over university communities, and it is at war with the First Amendment.”

The student detentions, primarily on the East Coast, had caused widespread concern at California universities, which host the largest international student population in the nation and were home to major pro-Palestinian encampments in 2024. At UCLA, faculty earlier this year set up a 24-hour hotline for students who feared being potentially detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — although there were no high-profile targeted removals of international student activists.

In separate actions this year, the government also temporarily revoked visas and immigration statuses for students across the UC system and at other U.S. campuses based on minor violations such as traffic tickets. Revocations were reversed nationwide after a federal suit was filed.

In the Boston case, lawyers for the Trump administration put up witnesses who testified there was no ideological deportation policy as the plaintiffs contended.

“There is no policy to revoke visas on the basis of protected speech,” Victoria Santora told the court. “The evidence presented at this trial will show that plaintiffs are challenging nothing more than government enforcement of immigration laws.”

John Armstrong, the senior bureau official in the Bureau of Consular Affairs, testified that visa revocations were based on long-standing immigration law. Armstrong acknowledged he played a role in the visa revocation of several high-profile activists, including Rumeysa Ozturk and Mahmoud Khalil, and was shown memos endorsing their removal.

Armstrong also insisted that visa revocations were not based on protected speech and rejected accusations that there was a policy of targeting someone for their ideology.

One witness testified that the campaign targeted more than 5,000 pro-Palestinian protesters. Out of the 5,000 names reviewed, investigators wrote reports on about 200 who had potentially violated U.S. law, Peter Hatch of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit testified. Until this year, Hatch said, he could not recall a student protester being referred for a visa revocation.

Among the report subjects was Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate Khalil, who was released last month after 104 days in federal immigration detention. Khalil has become a symbol of Trump’s clampdown on the protests.

Another was Tufts University student Ozturk, who was released in May from six weeks in detention after being arrested on a suburban Boston street. She said she was illegally detained after an op-ed she co-wrote last year criticizing her school’s response to the war in Gaza.

Casey writes for the Associated Press. Times staff writer Jaweed Kaleem contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is revoking the terrorism designation of a group led by Syria’s new president as part of a broader U.S. engagement with the transitional government since the ouster of former leader Bashar Assad late last year.

In a statement released on Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the move, which will take effect on Tuesday, “recognizes the positive actions taken by the new Syrian government” under President Ahmad al-Sharaa.

Earlier Monday, the Federal Register published an advance notice, which said Rubio made the decision on June 23 in consultation with the attorney general and Treasury secretary.

The decision had not been previously announced, although it was made as the Trump administration has been moving to ease or end many U.S. sanctions that had been imposed during Assad’s rule.

The step looks to further end Syria’s isolation since a lightning rebel offensive ousted the Assad family from decades of rule and gives the new government a boost as it tries to rebuild a country shattered by 13 years of civil war.

The brief notice offered no details about the revocation of the foreign terrorist organization designation for the al-Nusrah Front, also known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.

Al-Nusrah was originally designated a foreign terrorist organization for its previous affiliation with Al Qaeda. In 2017, it split and changed its name to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which the first Trump administration added to the initial designation.

Syria has been improving relations with the United States and other Western countries following the fall of Assad in December in an offensive led by Al-Sharaa ’s group.

On June 30, seven days after Rubio signed the revocation, President Trump signed an executive order ending many U.S. economic sanctions on Syria, following through on a promise he made to Al-Sharaa when the two met in Saudi Arabia in May.

“This FTO revocation is an important step in fulfilling President Trump’s vision of a stable, unified, and peaceful Syria,” Rubio said in his statement.

Trump’s executive order did not rescind sanctions imposed on Assad, his top aides, family members and officials who had been determined to have committed human rights abuses or been involved in drug trafficking or part of Syria’s chemical weapons program.

It also leaves intact a major set of sanctions passed by Congress targeting anyone doing business with or offering support to Syria’s military, intelligence or other suspect institutions.

While the Trump administration has passed temporary waivers on those sanctions, known as the Caesar Act, they can only be permanently repealed by law.

Lee writes for the Associated Press.

American universities have long feared that the Chinese government will restrict its country’s students from attending institutions that cross Beijing’s sensitive political lines.

Universities still fear that consequence today, but the most immediate threat is no longer posed by the Chinese government. Now, as the latest punishment meted out to the Trump administration’s preeminent academic scapegoat shows, it’s our own government posing the threat.

In a May 22 letter, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced she revoked Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification, meaning the university’s thousands of international students must transfer immediately or lose their legal status. Harvard can no longer enroll future international students either.

Noem cited Harvard’s failure to hand over international student disciplinary records in response to a prior letter and, disturbingly, the Trump administration’s desire to “root out the evils of anti-Americanism” on campus. Among the most alarming demands in this latest missive was that Harvard supply all video of “any protest activity” by any international student within the last five years.

Harvard immediately sued Noem and her department and other agencies, rightfully calling the revocation “a blatant violation of the First Amendment,” and within hours a judge issued a temporary restraining order against the revocation.

“Let this serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions across the country,” Noem wrote on X about the punishment. And on Tuesday, the administration halted interviews for all new student visas.

This is not how a free country treats its schools — or the international visitors who attend them.

Noem’s warning will, no doubt, be heard loud and clear. That’s because universities — which depend on international students’ tuition dollars — have already had reason to worry that they will lose access to international students for displeasing censorial government officials.

In 2010, Beijing revoked recognition of the University of Calgary’s accreditation in China, meaning Chinese students at the Canadian school suddenly risked paying for a degree worth little at home. The reason? The university’s granting of an honorary degree to the Dalai Lama the year before. “We have offended our Chinese partners by the very fact of bringing in the Dalai Lama, and we have work to resolve that issue,” a spokesperson said.

Beijing restored recognition over a year later, but many Chinese students had already left. Damage done.

Similarly, when UC San Diego hosted the Dalai Lama as commencement speaker in 2017, punishment followed. The China Scholarship Council suspended funding for academics intending to study at UCSD, and an article in the state media outlet Global Times recommended that Chinese authorities “not recognize diplomas or degree certificates issued by the university.”

This kind of direct punishment doesn’t happen very frequently. But the threat always exists, and it creates fear that administrators take into account when deciding how their universities operate.

American universities now must fear that they will suffer this penalty too, but at an even greater scale: revocation of access not just to students from China, but all international students. That’s a huge potential loss. At Harvard, for example, international students make up a whopping 27% of total enrollment.

Whether they publicly acknowledge it or not, university leaders probably are considering whether they need to adjust their behavior to avoid seeing international student tuition funds dry up.

Will our colleges and universities increase censorship and surveillance of international students? Avoid inviting commencement speakers disfavored by the Trump administration? Pressure academic departments against hiring any professors whose social media comments or areas of research will catch the eye of mercurial government officials?

And, equally disturbing, will they be willing to admit that they are now making these calculations at all? Unlike direct punishments by the Trump administration or Beijing, this chilling effect is likely to be largely invisible.

Harvard might be able to survive without international students’ tuition. But a vast number of other universities could not. The nation as a whole would feel their loss too: In the 2023-24 academic year, international students contributed a record-breaking $43.8 billion to the American economy.

And these students — who have uprooted their lives for the promise of what American education offers — are the ones who will suffer the most, as they experience weeks or months of panic and upheaval while being used as pawns in this campaign to punish higher ed.

If the Trump administration is seeking to root out “anti-Americanism,” it can begin by surveying its own behavior in recent months. Freedom of expression is one of our country’s most cherished values. Censorship, surveillance and punishment of government critics do not belong here.

Sarah McLaughlin is senior scholar on global expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and author of the forthcoming book “Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech.”