University professors sued a number of federal officials on Tuesday, claiming that the Trump administration violates the first amendment and creates a ‘climate of fear and oppression’ on campus by trying to deport pro-Palestinian activists.
“The Trump administration follows international scholars and students who talk their thoughts on Palestine, but make no mistake: they won’t stop there,” said a statement from Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, one of the groups who brought the matter. “They will come next for those who teach the history of slavery, or who provide sexual -affirming health care or who investigate climate change or give students advice on their reproductive choices.”
The complaint, which was submitted with the Knight First Amendment and a series of academic organizations in the Federal Court in Massachusetts, claims that the administration is trying to deport people for legal, constitutionally protected political expression around the Israeli Hamas conflict.
They claim that this view meant to terrorize students and faculties for their exercise of first amendment rights in the past, to intimidate them to exercise the rights now, and to silence political views that dissatisfied the government. “
This points to remarks from Trump officials such as the president, who said he would deport “all” non-citizens who joined the campus protests in Palestine, and a top official for domestic security who repeatedly refused in a recent NPR interview to answer or any form of protest against the government in immigration.
The lawsuit also describes member academics who scrub their social media profiles and course curricula of any mention of Israel and Palestine, for fear that non-citizens may be arrested by immigration officials.
The independent contacted the entities mentioned in the case – the White House, Immigration and Customs Holdiness, and the Departments of Home Security and State – for comment.
“This department does not apologize for its efforts to defend President Trump’s agenda in court and protect Jewish Americans from cruel anti -Semitism,” a spokesman for the Justice Department said The independent.
The administration has pursued deportation cases against a variety of non-citizen students and academics over the past few weeks.
It called up an obscure, controversial part of immigration law to remove legitimate US permanent residents, including the recent degree in Columbia and Protest Mahmoud Khalil, and current Columbia student Yunseo Chung, whose advocates say she just attended protests and never had a major campus discipline.
The administration is also working on the deportation against the Georgetown learned Badar Khan Suri and Cornell PhD Momodou Language, who claims that immigration officials have arrested him amid his lawsuit against the executive orders of the Trump administration on immigration and anti -Semitism.
The government maintains that the visa of language was revoked on its previous record on campus before the lawsuit began, and accused Khalil of not disclosing diplomatic and humanitarian work on his immigration forms.
The Trump administration has promised that these recent cases are the beginning of a larger wave of removal operations.
