Trump administration sued over policy of deporting foreign pro-Hamas agitators

The lawsuit argued in court documents that the Trump administration’s “policy has created a climate of repression and fear.”

By Dion J. Pierre, The Algemeiner

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and three of its local chapters have filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration to halt deportation proceedings involving expatriate pro-Hamas activists enrolled in American institutions of higher education, arguing that the allegedly seditious contents of their speech are protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

Filed on Tuesday in a Massachusetts federal court, the legal complaint comes several weeks after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) high-profile arrest and detainment of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University alumnus who was an architect of the Hamilton Hall building takeover and other disturbances in the New York City area this semester.

Similar action has since been taken against others, including Cornell University graduate student Momodou Taal, a dual citizen of Gambia and the United Kingdom, and Columbia University student Yunseo Chung, a noncitizen legal resident from South Korea.

In each case, a federal judge has blocked ICE from sending the students to their home countries. Most recently, a Manhattan judge ruled on Tuesday that the federal government cannot hold Yunseo Chung in detention while it decides whether she must leave the US.

President Donald Trump initiated the removal of pro-Hamas aliens living in the US through a January executive order which called for “using all appropriate legal tools to prosecute, remove, or otherwise … hold to account perpetrators of unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence.”

A major provision of the order calls for the deportation of extremist “alien” student activists, whose support for terrorist organizations, intellectual and material, such as Hamas contributed to fostering antisemitism, violence, and property destruction on college campuses.

Trump has also said that foreign students who hold demonstrations in support of Hamas “will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came.”

The AAUP and its chapters at Harvard University, Rutgers University, and New York University, along with the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), argued in court documents that the Trump administration’s “policy has created a climate of repression and fear,” charging that ICE is “terrorizing students and faculty for their exercise of First Amendment rights in the past, intimidating them from exercising those rights now, and silencing political viewpoints that the government disfavors.”

The complaint continued, “The ideological-deportation policy violates the First Amendment because it entails the arrest, detention, and deportation of noncitizen students and faculty on the basis of, or in retaliation for, their political viewpoints; because it burdens the rights of plaintiffs and their US citizen members to hear from, and associate with, those noncitizen students and faculty; and because the policy is not narrowly tailored to any compelling government interest.”

As previously reported by The Algemeiner, pro-Hamas activists have, since the terrorist group’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel, allegedly violated the civil rights of Jewish students, penned extremist manifestos calling for revolutionary violence and overthrowing the government, and contributed to the spread of anti-Western beliefs.

Additionally, pro-Hamas activists have perpetrated gang assaults, threatened to commit mass murders of Jewish college students, and vandalized private property, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.

Recently, a lawsuit, first reported by the The Free Press, alleged that Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the principal organizer of pro-Hamas activities on US campuses, received advanced knowledge of the Oct. 7 massacre, suggesting a level of coordination between US-based anti-Zionists and jihadist terrorist groups that could pose a danger to national security.

Trump has previously defended the policy of removing pro-Hamas activists from the US, most notably after it was first implemented with Khalil’s arrest on March 8.

“This is the first of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other universities across the country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, antisemitism, anti-American activity, and the Trump administration will not tolerate it,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.

“Many are not students; they are paid agitators. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again.”

Trump went on to arg1ue that the presence of those who support terrorism on US soil undermines American national security interests, adding that he expects colleges and universities to comply with his executive order.

The policy has many detractors, such as AAUP president Todd Wolfson, who said in a statement issued on Monday that it undermines civil liberties and may one day target “those who teach the history of slavery or who provide gender-affirming health care or who research climate change or who counsel students about their reproductive choices.”

Alex Joffe, anthropologist and editor of BDS Monitor for Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, told The Algemeiner on Wednesday that the administration’s actions are legal and safeguard US interests.

“The Trump administration’s new policy of deporting pro-Hamas demonstrators who are not citizens is an important step toward addressing problems related to Hamas in America,” he explained in a statement. “The Immigration and Naturalization Act clearly gives the Secretary of State the authority to deport aliens on a variety of grounds, including endangering public safety and national security.”

Joffe added that the expatriates selected for deportation violated the conditions of their residency in the US by “giving material support to a designated terrorist group (be it Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Houthis)” and “organizing demonstrations, which have included violence and the destruction of property.”

In arguing his position, he pointed to the case of Brown University physician Rasha Alawieh, whom the federal government deported to Lebanon after learning that she had attended the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah, who was the leader of the Iran-backed Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah.

“Overall, however, due to the Trump administration’s haphazard messaging, the evidence showing the threats to public safety and national security has been overshadowed by allegations that the deportation policy is an effort to quash free speech and chill public discourse. The terrorist connections and revolutionary motivations of groups such as Columbia University Apartheid Divest and Within Our Lifetime have similarly been ignored by most media. So, too, has the role of their various funders and amplifiers, including left-wing American foundations [and] the Chinese Communist Party” Joffe continued.

“The administration’s communications skills need to improve significantly on these issues to provide more detailed information on bad actors, their motivations and backers, and not simply superficialities that stir outrage.”