At the top of his extraordinary 161-page court ruling upholding free speech in the age of President Donald Trump, Massachusetts-based U.S. District Judge William G. Young reproduced a handwritten note he’d received anonymously from someone in MAGA-land. “Trump has pardons and tanks,” it taunted. “What do you have?”
The handwritten anonymous note sent to U.S. District Judge William G. Young and his typed response. Reproduced from his opinion in American Association of University Professors v. Rubio.
Young also pasted his reply: “Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous. Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, We the People of the United States—you and me—have our magnificent Constitution. Here’s how that works out in a specific case.”
Young’s September 30 ruling in a lawsuit brought by academic associations takes Trump and his minions to task for their contemptuous disregard for the free speech rights of foreign students in the United States. It finds that members of Team Trump, including Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, “acted in concert to misuse the sweeping powers of their respective offices to target noncitizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their First Amendment protected political speech.”
Young, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, argues that these students absolutely enjoy free-speech protections under the First Amendment, as affirmed by other courts, including the Supreme Court. “[O]n its face, the First Amendment does not distinguish between citizens and noncitizens,” Young observes. Instead it says simply that Congress “shall make no law” abridging anyone’s free speech or assembly rights.
Trump, on his first day in office in January 2025, issued two interrelated Executive Orders. The first, “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” barred federal officers from engaging in “any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.” The second, “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats,” pledged vigilance against “aliens who intend to commit terrorist attacks, threaten our national security, espouse hateful ideology [boldface in ruling], or otherwise exploit the immigration laws for malevolent purposes.” Both orders explicitly exclude noncitizens from First Amendment protections, something Young noted in his ruling “is not to be found in our history or jurisprudence.”
Among the cases Young examines are those of Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident who helped lead pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia University, and Rümeysa Öztürk, a visa-issued Tufts University graduate student who co-wrote an op-ed for the student newspaper in early 2024 criticizing her university’s response to Israel’s massive bloodletting in Gaza. Both were arrested in March 2025 (in Öztürk’s case by masked federal agents), detained for extended periods, and now face ongoing efforts to deport them.
The Trump Administration’s goal in pursuing such actions, Young wrote, is “to strike fear into similarly situated noncitizen pro-Palestinian individuals” to keep them from engaging in “lawful pro-Palestinian speech.” He said the effort to deport them “continues unconstitutionally to chill freedom of speech to this day.”
Young also blasts the use of masks by immigration agents as being meant solely “to terrorize Americans into quiescence,” calling it reminiscent of “cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan.” He calls the government’s stated reasons for the wearing of masks “disingenuous, squalid, and dishonorable.”
The case, American Association of University Professors v. Rubio, is in Young’s estimation “perhaps the most important ever to fall within the jurisdiction of this district court.”
I’d go further: It’s among the most important to come before any court.
At issue in this case, Young wrote, are the free expression rights of all Americans. As he put it: “My belief is that we must have freedom of speech, press, and religion for all or we may eventually have it for none. I further believe that the First Amendment grants an absolute right to believe in any governmental system, discuss all governmental affairs, and argue for desired changes in the existing order.” It was the Founders’ intent, he says, to hold in check “bad, tyrannical governments” that see this as a threat.
Young’s ruling is just one of a number of lower court decisions that have affirmed the right of free speech against the authoritarian impulses of the Trump Administration. Earlier that same month, another federal judge in Massachusetts, Allison D. Burroughs, rebuked the Trump Administration over its efforts to punish Harvard University for not caving to its demands, as other institutions of higher learning have done.
According to Burroughs, Team Trump “used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically motivated assault,” in violation of the First Amendment and other laws. She noted that the administration’s demands concerned “Harvard’s governance, staffing and hiring practices, and admissions policies—all of which have little to do with antisemitism and everything to do with Defendants’ power and political views.”
Young echoes this in his decision, accusing the Trump Administration of a “full-throated assault on the First Amendment across the board under the cover of an unconstitutionally broad definition of antisemitism.”
The Trump Administration, of course, has vowed to appeal both rulings, along with any others that don’t go its way. But there is reason for optimism that even the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court, if it takes up these cases, will have a hard time abiding Trump’s flagrant violations of the First Amendment. The Court has consistently taken an expansive view of its free speech protections—too far, in the estimation of some.
Thus, we have in recent years seen Supreme Court rulings that allow interest groups to spend unlimited sums to influence elections; sports coaches to proselytize for particular religions; and website designers to turn away same-sex couples. In a case that’s now pending, the Court seems poised to affirm the free speech rights of therapists who try to bully people out of their gender identities—aka debunked “conversion therapy.”
It’s hard to see how, after all this, the Court could somehow not conclude that the First Amendment bars the government from locking up and deporting legal residents for saying something Trump doesn’t like.
What Judge Young has done is provide an example of principled opposition to the President’s anti-free-speech agenda, one based on American values and the Constitution. Similar action, he indicates, is needed to blunt Trump’s other efforts to exact retribution against those he perceives as enemies—including law firms, media, and institutions of higher education.
Young, in his ruling, says Trump’s failure to grasp that “the government simply cannot seek retribution for speech he disdains poses a great threat to Americans’ freedom of speech.” But he seems equally troubled by the acquiescence of those whose speech rights are threatened.
“[O]ur bastions of independent unbiased free speech—those entities we once thought unassailable—have proven [illusory],” Young writes. “Behold President Trump’s successes in limiting free speech—law firms cower, institutional leaders in higher education meekly appease the President, media outlets from huge conglomerates to small niche magazines mind the bottom line rather than the ethics of journalism.”
Young is right: Some law firms and universities have caved to Trump’s demands. Some media outlets, notably including ABC News and CBS News, have agreed to pony up large sums to settle Trump’s specious defamation suits. But some have also held firm.
Harvard University is fighting the administration’s effort to hijack its policies and curriculum. Dozens of reporters, including those from The New York Times, the Associated Press, The Atlantic, and even Fox News and Newsmax, refused to sign agreements with the Pentagon not to publish (or even ask about!) information whose release is not approved, even though it meant being exiled from the building.
And just look at how quickly and effectively the tables turned against the administration’s ham-handed efforts to silence ABC talk show host Jimmy Kimmel for making an inapt comment about the political affiliations of the man who killed rightwing activist Charlie Kirk. These efforts included Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr’s gangster-like threat to revoke the network’s license (“We can do this the easy way or the hard way”) as well as Trump’s declared intent to sue over it to make money. (“Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 million,” the President gloated. “This one sounds even more lucrative.”) In the end, the President got derision and Kimmel stayed on the air, as sassy as ever.
Team Trump, of course, has learned nothing. In mid-October, it revoked the visas of at least six visa holders who purportedly either criticized or made light of Kirk’s assassination. Agents of the government continue to rifle through the social media accounts of foreigners in search of improper ideas.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The courts, as Young proved anew, can still rebuff the lawlessness of the Trump Administration. So can American institutions, from the media to higher ed. So can the public. But it’s not clear whether that will happen. Young’s ruling ends on this note: “I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious Constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected. Is he correct?”
Good question.