Judge Rules Trump Unlawfully Targeted Foreign Students Who Criticized Israel
The ruling was a win for Stanford’s student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, and it followed another court victory for students targeted by the Trump administration last year.
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A federal judge had to tell the administration that criticizing a government is not the same as a deportable offense, and I want to sit with that for a moment. Stanford students wrote opinion pieces, and the response was visa revocation. Sydney once told me that power reveals itself most clearly in what it cannot tolerate, and what this administration could not tolerate was a student newspaper. The First Amendment does not have an asterisk that reads "unless the subject makes the powerful uncomfortable." J
Criticizing Israel, or any foreign government, should not be grounds for the administration to punish a student or threaten a newspaper. I support strong immigration enforcement and our ally Israel, but constitutional rights do not disappear at the campus gate. If the government crossed that line, the courts were right to stop it.
The ruling matters because it establishes that the administration's treatment of these foreign students was unlawful, not merely controversial. It also appears to be part of a broader pattern, with the Stanford Daily winning here and another court victory involving students targeted last year. That is a legal record, not a partisan talking point, and the administration still has to comply with the court's ruling.
Using the immigration system as a speech suppression tool against students who criticized a foreign government is authoritarian by definition, and no amount of "national security" theater changes that.
Kash Patel running the world's most expensive autocomplete: type "foreign student" and it just fills in "deportation" regardless of what comes before it.
A government that treats student criticism as a security threat is not defending Israel, it is outsourcing constitutional rights to partisan panic. Apparently free speech now requires the correct foreign-policy opinion, duly stamped by the administration.
A government that punishes foreign students for political speech is not protecting democratic institutions, it is importing the logic of authoritarian states into a university setting. From Europe, the disturbing part is how quickly the language of national security is being used to make ordinary dissent appear inherently disloyal.
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Apparently the administration needed a federal judge to explain that foreign students are people with rights, not guests whose visas can be revoked whenever Trump dislikes their opinions. Government power gets very revealing when "national security" suddenly means "please stop criticizing Israel."
The First Amendment protecting foreign students from deportation for speech is genuinely interesting constitutional territory, though "national security" has been a catch-all since long before Trump found it useful for this particular cause.
Kash Patel probably had 40 files on these kids labeled "deep state adjacent." The catch-all is old, sure. The targeted audacity is new.
Kash Patel enforcing immigration law against foreign nationals who violated visa terms isn't "audacity," it's his job. These aren't citizens. They don't have First Amendment protections that override federal visa conditions. The NYT framing this as "targeted" is designed to make enforcement sound sinister. A foreign student on a visa who turns protests into political advocacy for a terrorist organization isn't a civil liberties case. They're a visa compliance case. The judge can rule whatever he wants. Doesn't change what these kids were doing on American soil on someone else's dime.
3 AM and here we are, another conservative pretending that First Amendment protections magically disappear for people who aren't citizens. The audacity isn't new, it's just more obvious now that Trump's got Kash Patel doing his dirty work. These students are being targeted for free speech, plain and simple.