\n<\/p>\n
The administration\u2019s push to deport international students and scholars prompted protests and lawsuits.<\/p>\n
David Dee Delgado\/Getty Images News<\/span><\/p>\n Federal government officials targeted and arrested international students for First Amendment\u2013protected activity last year, despite internal concerns about the legality of such efforts, newly unsealed court documents show.<\/p>\n Dossiers and summaries compiled by government officials used to justify legal action against international students targeted by the Department of Homeland Security do not include allegations of criminality but instead focus on their participation in pro-Palestinian protests.<\/p>\n Documents show such arrests were in connection with students exercising their First Amendment rights, with DHS officials casting pro-Palestinian protests as antisemitic and arguing that targeted individuals presented a threat to U.S foreign policy based on their activism. <\/p>\n While a judge ruled against the federal government last fall, documents unsealed on Thursday offer new insights into the case. That same day, U.S. District Judge William Young also ruled that the Trump administration\u2019s policy of targeting international students and faculty members for their activism was unlawful and in violation of the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act, and he imposed limits on how the federal government may pursue related immigration actions.<\/p>\n Targets named in the documents include Mahmoud Khalil, R\u00fcmeysa \u00d6zt\u00fcrk, Mohsen Mahdawi, Yunseo Chung\u2014all current students or recent graduates\u2014and Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University. All were targeted for speech protected by the First Amendment.<\/p>\n In a memo intended for U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, subordinates flagged various transgressions that they argued justified action against international students and scholars, such as leading campus protests. In the case of \u00d6zt\u00fcrk, the justification was that she had written an op-ed in a student newspaper in which she called for Tufts University, which she attends, to divest from companies with direct ties to Israel due to concerns about Palestinian casualties.<\/p>\n Federal officials tried to tie Suri to Hamas through his wife, a Palestinian American whose father once advised a Hamas leader. A government memo included claims from outside sources that Suri \u201cactively spreads the terror group\u2019s propaganda and promotes virulent antisemitism.\u201d DHS officials have repeated such claims publicly but have not provided any evidence.<\/p>\n Officials painted protest activities broadly as antisemitic, arguing in one document that targets such as Khalil were \u201ccreating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization.\u201d However, documents did not include evidence of any ties to or support for Hamas. Instead, officials broadly framed participation in protests or social media posts critical of the Israeli government and military as inherently supportive of Hamas.<\/p>\n But even as they targeted students, federal officials knew they were on shaky legal ground.<\/p>\n \u201cGiven the potential that a court may consider his actions inextricably tied to speech protected under the First Amendment, it is likely that courts will scrutinize the basis for this determination,\u201d federal government officials wrote in a memo that justified the arrest of international scholars.<\/p>\n Before issuing the order Thursday, Young blasted federal officials from the bench last week, proclaiming that Rubio and U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem failed to uphold the Constitution and engaged in a \u201cconspiracy to pick off certain people\u201d for their beliefs, despite clear First Amendment concerns.<\/p>\n Free speech advocates have sharply criticized the federal government for arresting and attempting to deport international students solely based on their pro-Palestinian activism.<\/p>\n \u201cNewly unsealed evidence makes it even clearer that Rubio and Noem knew they were targeting students based solely on their political speech and that they knew this policy was unconstitutional. They just didn\u2019t care,\u201d Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, which supported plaintiffs in the case, wrote online. \u201cThe policy had nothing to do with fighting antisemitism and everything to do with suppressing legitimate and constitutionally protected criticism of Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n The lawsuit against the Trump administration was filed last year by the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association. In a social media post following the order, AAUP president Todd Wolfson wrote, \u201cThis ruling is not everything we needed or expected but it is still a significant step forward.\u201d<\/p>\n DHS officials did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The administration\u2019s push to deport international students and scholars prompted protests and lawsuits. David Dee Delgado\/Getty Images News Federal government officials targeted and arrested international students for First Amendment\u2013protected activity last year, despite internal concerns about the legality of such efforts, newly unsealed court documents show. Dossiers and summaries compiled by government officials used to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42794,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[2167,400,1053,678,2464],"class_list":{"0":"post-42793","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-dhs","9":"tag-protected","10":"tag-speech","11":"tag-students","12":"tag-targeted"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42793\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/42794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}