Secretary of State Marco Rubio personally approved the deportation of five student activists last year after receiving memos largely describing their participation in pro-Palestinian protests and their writings about the war in Gaza, according to internal government documents unsealed by a federal judge on Thursday.
The documents reveal new details about how the Trump administration decided to target the activists, who were all foreign students visible in campus protests. They had been in the United States legally but were arrested and threatened with deportation last spring.
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Judge William G. Young, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, ruled last year that the Trump administration had illegally targeted the students for deportation based on their speech — in particular their opposition to the Israeli government and its military operations in Gaza.
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[The documents] also show that officials privately anticipated the possibility that the deportations might not hold up in court because much of the conduct highlighted could be seen as protected speech.
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In one set of documents with the referrals, officials acknowledged that almost no grounds existed for deporting the students other than a rarely used 1952 law that says the secretary of state may deem noncitizens deportable for reasons related to foreign policy.
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In justifying the attempt to deport the students, Mr. Rubio and other administration officials repeatedly asserted that they had supported terrorist organizations.
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The students have denied that charge. They sued over their arrests, and judges last year ordered each of them released, citing concerns that their arrests had been based on protected speech.
The case before Judge Young, brought by two national academic organizations, argued more broadly that the arrests had chilled academic speech on the nation’s college campuses. Judge Young agreed, describing the behavior of Mr. Rubio and Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, as an “unconstitutional conspiracy” to “pick off” a few students with an eye to “violating” the free speech rights of thousands of noncitizen scholars.
NYT
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