A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration violated the constitutional rights of international students in seeking to deport them for their pro-Palestinian activism and criticism of Israel. The ruling is the result of a lawsuit filed by The Stanford Daily, the student newspaper at Stanford University, which claimed that some of its writers on student visas declined to report on topics related to Israel and Palestine, or requested their published articles be removed from the paper’s website, for fear of deportation.
“What we were hearing from the noncitizens in our newsroom and from noncitizens across campus — current students, former students, alumni — was that they were genuinely frightened because of what they saw in the headlines, what they saw happen to Rümeysa Öztürk,” says George Porteous, editor-in-chief of The Stanford Daily. Rümeysa Öztürk is the former Tufts University graduate student arrested and detained by ICE after co-authoring an op-ed encouraging Tufts to divest from Israel in her university’s student newspaper.
“The chill is the point,” adds Will Creeley, legal director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, the organization that represented The Stanford Daily in court. “That’s a First Amendment violation every day of the week. It’s flatly un-American.”
