A federal trial reveals the sprawling plan behind Trump’s attacks against pro-Palestinian students

In April, the American district judge William Young, who was in Boston, made a procedural decision of the bench which seemed to catch the lawyers in the courtroom by surprise. Like many other judges these days, Young had summoned an audience to examine the opportunity to grant a preliminary injunction – which, in the normal course, would put a rapid judgment to an illegal or other unconstitutional government policy. According to a charge, within seventy days of the presidency of Donald Trump, forty-six judges across the country have issued this type of order, preventing the administration from continuing with its style of governance in moving. The goal behind these orders is to prevent imminent and irreparable damage to the complainants and to allow the time courts to assess the legality of the disputed action.

But judge Young had other ideas. “In accordance with the federal rule of civil procedure 65 (A)”, he announced according to the open, “a new hearing on the request for preliminary injunction is combined with the trial on the merits.” In other words, he will not simply grant short -term relief and would have given a boost on the road. There would be a trial, and this would occur quickly – which meant that deposits, documents of documents, case management conferences and other minutes would all fall in a few months before the start of the procedure during the summer. This choice triggered what can be described as the most consecutive and extensive trial of the second presidency Trump: American Association of University Professors et al. v. Marco Rubio – or AAUP c. Rubio, for short-circuit-reduces the systematic campaign of the administration to stop, disappear, hold and deport demonstrators and defenders of pro-Palestinian students.

The targets of this shocking crusade, all the holders of non -citizen visas or the permanent legitimate residents who have spoken against the war in Gaza, are well known, others more than others: Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, Mohsen Mahdawi, Yunnseo Chung, Badar Khan Suri. All landed on government radar and were prosecuted by ICEAbove the same time in March and April. All argue that the government has sought to expel them on the basis of their anti-war discourse protected by the Constitution, and won or obtained their freedom to hold immigration in the process. However, this freedom – and their freedom to stay in the United States – is tenuous. The government always wants Khalil and the other students to re-entertain themselves, back to the immigration court, or to fight for their chance to stay or to study in the United States in a very complex legal proceedings.

For Khalil, Öztürk and others, the truth about how and why ICE Hunting them was somewhat elusive. They and their lawyers know what the others of us know: it is the public faces of a campaign against the demonstrators of pro-Palestinian students who are part of a much broader aggression against the first amendment and higher education itself. The administration, for its part, was brutally honest about his intentions: “This is the first arrest of many to come,” wrote Trump on Truth Social, two days after Khalil, an Algerian citizen of Syrian origin who was about to obtain his diploma from Columbia University, was apprehended. Stressing “the policy of this administration”, Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary of the White House, said that participation in the “anti-American, anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas protest would not be tolerated” and that the Ministry of Homeland Security “used intelligence” to identify the students who did it. Rubio, the Secretary of State, on the other hand, has personally signed visa and green cards revisions through an unused authority which is granted to him under immigration laws. After Öztürk, a Turkish national of his fifth year as a doctoral student at TUFTS University, was arrested, following an editorial she wrote, Rubio admitted that he was behind his detention. “At one point, I hope we exhaust ourselves because we got rid of everyone,” he said. “But we are looking for these crazy people every day who tear things up.” This opening is not lost for judge Young. “The government does not act secretly here,” he said in court. “One thing that can be said is the pretty government about what she does.”

But the students targeted by the administration, to date, do not fully know what the government knows, as how they found themselves on a black list which was then acted by the Department of State and other immigration authorities. They also do not know how state agents, whether in the field or in an office in Washington, DC, decided to brighten them up, then proceeded to their detention and their attempted deportation. There has also been no official account of the frightening effect that this coored approach had on dozens of other international students, academics and academics who now feel that they must take advantage of, withdraw from public life, rub their online presence or abstain from protest. This is the objective of AAUP c. Rubio, who was not brought by Khalil and the other students who were distinguished by the administration but, rather, by the people who fear that they are the next in the line of fire. The trial is important because, for the first time, this richness of truth, largely in possession of the government, and its broader effects are revealed in a way that they would not have otherwise – if alone in the fragmentary dispute, the procedures of Habeas, if not in distant immigration courses, where the process itself, because Khalil and his legal team know it well, is a form of punishment. As illustrated by the illustration of judicial files in the parallel cases of students against the administration, these are forums where business may not Never Go to trial.

Judge Young likes trials. As he said when he decided to have one in this affair, “trials try the hand for justice … in the best way that humanity knows. That’s what I want. I want a trial. You gave me the base to order one. I am. “

Because it is a trial for the bench, to make the young judge – rather than a jury – the only arbitrator of the facts and of the law, he clearly argued that he was not intention to relaunch any of the student affairs, or else to mix with the work of the other judges who deal with them. “I do not indicate other judges,” he said at the start of the trial. He directed a tight ship, keeping strict deadlines (four and a half days of testimony by side) and remaining focused on the questions to be accomplished, who did what and when during the implementation of government policy to bring the pro-Palestininens students for the deportation; Proof of the way in which the rights of the first amendment of the organizations of the complainants and those of the members of the non-citizens were raped; And evidence that shows that the government is responsible for these damages. Below, the judge will examine the type of remedy he can order, if necessary.

Unlike students demonstrators, all of whom have legal status to carry their own affairs against the government for their suffering, the complainants here – the American association of university professors, three of its chapters and the Middle East Studies Association – A different type of damage: their inability to fully exercise their right to teach, write, organize and collaborate with the sites, because the researchers often did in their various fields. (The case was deposited by the Knight First Amendment Institute of Columbia University. Since May, I have organized a podcast, “The Bully’s Pulpit”, produced by the Institute, but I have no connection with its legal team.) Some of them have unique links with Khalil and the students who have been targeted. Nadia Abu El-Haj, professor at Columbia, explained how Mahdawi, a Palestinian refugee who was studying at university, told him that he had the feeling that he was next after Khalil’s arrest: “He asked me to convince the president of the University of Columbia to move him from his shelter of Columbia who was out of campus inside the Gates Judicial for the Gates, because to this point, the point required a judiciary for the gates for the gates, because otherwise the point, the point required a judiciary for the contribution within the Gates, because to this point, the point required a judiciary for the contribution inside for the gates, because to this point the point, the university demanded a judicial automy for the gates, ICE The agents to enter the doors of Columbia, and the outside properties were less secure. (Finally, Mahdawi was arrested by ICE In Vermont, after having traveled in the state for a planned naturalization interview. He was released just in time for his diploma in May.)

The government, still engaged in students’ deportations, has endeavored to remember private conversations with Mahdawi or Öztürk admitted to the file – as when Öztürk, shortly before his Arrest and the trial finally confirmed, fed the names in the operation of the administration against pro -Palestinian students. Young would not leave the content of the conversation in evidence, but Öztürk’s adviser at Tufts, Sara Johnson, was able to describe the effect that this Doxing had on her and her pupil: “Her eyes were red. His face was swollen. She was clearly trying to hold back tears with a Kleenex punch. ”

The extent to which the administration acted on nearly five thousand councils from Canary Mission and Betar US, another pro-Israeli group, which together compiled thousands of profiles from Pro-Palestinian students, has become a major pillar of the complainants. Peter Hatch, deputy information director at ICEInternal security surveys, on the third day of the trial testified that “most” of the names came from the Canary mission. “We have received information on the same demonstrator from several sources, but Canary Mission was the most inclusive,” he said. The volume of names was such that the government created a “team of tigers” – a term of art in the federal government – intelligence analysts to quickly treat the names of the demonstrators to create “analysis reports” to more than one hundred of them, who would then be shared with the State Department for additional action. Reports for Khalil, Öztürk and the other students were admitted to evidence and shown as an audience opened for the first time – to this point, the government had never disclosed them, despite the lawyers of students who asked for reports and other relevant documents.

Currently, there is no doubt that this effort was a carefully orchestrated policy, involving several components in different agencies. However, the higher the official in the chain of command, the more their resistance to admission than there was one. John Armstrong, the head of the Consular Affairs Office of the State Department and the person who signed “memos of action” so that Rubio implements – including those involved four of the five students – refused a lawyer for his operation, is similar to an ideological deportation policy. “At the end of the day, the male stops with me,” he said the fifth day of the trial. “I would know if there was an ideological expulsion policy that involved the Consular Affairs Office. It is silly to suggest that there is such a policy that I do not know. ”