Groups representing university professors sued the Trump administration on Tuesday, alleging that its practice of arresting and threatening noncitizen students and faculty members for protesting on campus deprives U.S. citizens of their right to engage with foreign-born peers and to hear their perspectives.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, takes a broader approach than a flurry of other recent lawsuits challenging the federal government’s deportation policies on college campuses. Those suits, including two involving a Columbia student and a recent graduate who are green card holders, aim to stop individual deportation proceedings.
The lawsuit filed Tuesday challenges the Trump administration’s overall approach to deportation, saying it is unconstitutional.
The decision to target noncitizens who participate in pro-Palestinian protest activity and speech, the lawsuit argues, has created a broadly chilling effect on what can be heard on college campuses.
“Today, the administration is going after pro-Palestinian speech, but tomorrow it can go after speech criticizing fossil fuels, speech promoting D.E.I. or speech defending gender-affirming care,” said Ramya Krishnan, a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, which is representing the professors in the lawsuit.
“There’s really no limiting principle to the administration’s theory here, and that’s part of what’s so disturbing,” she said.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit include the American Association of University Professors, a nonprofit group focused on issues of academic freedom, and three of its chapters, at Harvard, New York University and Rutgers, as well as the nonprofit Middle East Studies Association. The Knight Institute is an independent organization that does not represent the Columbia administration.
The suit hinges on a First Amendment principle that Americans have a right not only to express ideas but also to hear them. This is being violated, it argues, as noncitizens avoid political protests, purge their social media and step back from participation in groups engaged in pro-Palestinian advocacy. It is also reflected through self-censoring in the classroom, which is done to avoid attention, the suit says.
“We’ve spoken to faculty that have modified their syllabi or decided against teaching entire courses out of fear that teaching certain material could put a target on their backs,” Ms. Krishnan said.
The lawsuit argues that the deportation policy also violates the Fifth Amendment, which ensures due process, because it fails to give noncitizen students and faculty members “fair warning as to what speech and association the government believes to be grounds for arrest, detention and deportation.”
The defendants named in the lawsuit are President Trump; Marco Rubio, the secretary of state; Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security; and Todd Lyons, the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The State Department said by email that “as a general matter, we do not comment on ongoing or pending litigation.” The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
