In his recent joint address to Congress, Donald Trump triumphed that free speech in America is once again a sacred right.
“I have stopped all government censorship,” he declared victoriously, “and brought back free speech in America.” However, anyone who has paid close attention to the news over the past month will have seen that Trump’s supposed affinity for freedom of speech is demonstrably mendacious.
Look no further than the baseless harassment of our country’s international student population as proof. Rumeysa Ozturk – a 30-year-old Fulbright scholar from Turkey – was nabbed off the streets by masked men in Boston and disappeared to a remote ICE detention facility in rural Louisiana that human rights organizations have described as “a black hole” for publishing an op-ed in her university newspaper. Mahmoud Khalil – who is being held at the same Louisiana facility – was similarly arrested and disappeared in front of his pregnant girlfriend at their university-owned apartment in March. However, they are not the only ones (at the time of writing this, a student at the University of Minnesota was detained by “two plainclothes federal officers” according to the Associated Press).
Countless students across our country fear repercussions for exercising their basic right to freely express their opinions. This is clearly a violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which Trump and his cortège swore an oath to protect.
Of course, the Trump administration isn’t so forward about its attack on our international students, but the justifications for these arrests are dubious at best. If we take the case of Mahmoud Khalil, the alleged reason for his arrest was that he violated a rarely used act invoked by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Section 237(a)(4)(C) of the Immigration and Nationality Act says that “an alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.”
However, as Ahilan Arulanantham and Adam Cox write in their brilliant legal explainer of the case, there are glaring implications with this reasoning. First, it grants “an almost entirely undefined deportation power to the Secretary of State” allowing Rubio to “declare nearly anything” an objective of US foreign policy. “Once having cleared that very low bar,” write Arulanantham and Cox, Rubio “can then declare deportable any noncitizen so long as the [Rubio] has ‘reasonable ground to believe’ their presences ‘undermines that policy objective.’” They provide a crude analogy to solidify their point:
“If the government has an objective to promote fossil fuel use across the globe, for example, then the Secretary of State could deem climate science advocates—or even noncitizens who own green technology firms—deportable on the ground that their residency “undermines the policy objective” of promoting fossil fuels.”
If this was not alarming enough, The Free Press reported that a White House official told them “that the basis for targeting Khalil is being used as a blueprint for investigations against other students” and that the allegation against him doesn’t allege that he broke any laws. The White House argues that Khalil was “‘mobilizing support for Hamas and spreading antisemitism in a way that is contrary to the foreign policy of the US” but still has not provided any substantial evidence to back their claim. Moreover, Jewish students and groups have stood up for Khalil on multiple occasions. This obviously does not look good if you’re the Trump administration, which is scrambling to drum up a reason that legally allows for Khalil’s deportation.
Now, the Justice Department alleges that Khalil “failed to disclose his employment as a program manager by the Syria Office in the British Embassy in Beirut after 2022” and that he “did not disclose that he was a member of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) as a political officer or that he was part of Columbia University Apartheid Divest when he applied to become a permanent resident in 2024.”
But these spurious accusations of fraud undermine the foreign policy grounding from which the Trump administration had previously argued. First, the White House said Khalil was arrested because of his alleged support of Hamas – and, importantly, not because he committed any crimes – but now the reasoning has shifted to allegations of fraud. Baher Azmy, one of Khalil’s attorneys, says that “these late-breaking, after-the-fact allegations, silly as they are, primarily show that the government must know the supposed ‘foreign policy’ grounds for Mahmoud’s removal are absurd and unconstitutional.” She doubles down by pointing out how the new charges against Khalil “cannot change the obvious fact the government has admitted” which is that “[Khalil] is being punished in the most autocratic way for his constitutionally protected speech.”
Let me be clear: I do not support any activity that is antisemitic or supportive in any way of terrorist organizations like Hamas. However, I think framing the situation in these terms is irresponsible. As I stated before, there is no conclusive evidence against Khalil that his actions were doing so in the way that those in the Trump administration allege. You can disagree with the politics of Khalil and the other students who have been arrested but it is perfectly within their right to express their opinions. The Supreme Court in 1945 ruled that political speech was not a legal basis to deport alien residents, and thus Khalil and other international students are entitled to first amendment protection. As Justice Frank Murphy wrote on the concurring opinion to the case:
“… once an alien lawfully enters and resides in this country he becomes invested with the rights guaranteed by the Constitution to all people within our borders. Such rights include those protected by the First and Fifth Amendments and by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. None of these provisions acknowledges any distinctions between citizens and resident aliens. They extend their inalienable privileges to all ‘persons’ and guard against any encroachment of those rights by federal or state authority. Indeed, this Court has previously and expressly recognized that Harry Bridges, the alien, possesses the right to free speech and free press and that the Constitution will defend him in the exercise of that right.”
But the lack of legal and moral clarity from the Trump administration inevitably implies that people in America are being targeted simply for their legal right to speak and think freely, a situation that will only worsen if allowed to proceed to its logical conclusion. It is incumbent upon all of us to uphold the most foundational right in our country of free speech and thought and defend it from any attempt at intimidation and intrusion, especially from our government.
To my relief, this seems to be a uniting issue (for the most part) for those on both sides of the political spectrum. Right-wingers like Ron Paul have expressed their dismay at the situation, with Paul leaving the blunt warning that “this war on speech will not end with only foreigners being punished.” Additionally, Andrew Day, an editor at The American Conservative wrote an interesting piece that claims those on the right (MAGA in particular) should also oppose the recent trend of targeting pro-Palestinian voices for their views. He writes, “MAGA conservatives have a principled reason to defend Khalil’s right to free speech, even if they don’t agree with his anti-Israel views. Free speech is a cornerstone of our republican system of government, as the Founders knew well.”
He continues to argue that another “reason the actions against Khalil should give MAGA pause is that the administration seems to be acting on behalf of Israel, not the American people.” Khalil was arrested after being the subject of a “two-day targeted online campaign against Khalil by pro-Israel groups and individuals,” according to Drop Site News, and Haaretz has even reported that ICE has “paused its human trafficking and drug smuggling investigations to have agents monitor social media for posts and likes from pro-Palestinian students.” This news comes as the State Department has opted to use artificial intelligence to review “tens of thousands of student visa holders’ social media accounts” according to Axios. Day is right; how are any of these actions aligned with the interests of the American people or Trump’s “America First” agenda?
The short answer is they aren’t. The First Amendment states very clearly there shall be no law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” What is happening around our country right now threatens this basic premise. Foreign students or not, our Founders understood freedom of speech to be a natural right that “preexisted the government,” therefore making it a right that is to be excluded from the pressures of government. Of course, there will always be challenges along the way, but that is why I write this column to remind fellow Americans what is at stake. We are at a crossroads and must support each other more now then ever before. We must never back down from intimidation. Together, we can indeed build a better path forward.
