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By Sharon Zhang / Truthout
Newly unsealed memos by the State Department on the Trump administration’s push to deport pro-Palestine student advocates have confirmed that officials knew the cases against the students were shaky and likely to run up against their First Amendment rights.
The documents were unsealed by a federal judge on Thursday. The case, brought by academic groups, has been full of bombshell revelations on the role of top officials like Secretary of State Marco Rubio in the campaign dubbed as “unconstitutional” by the judge last week.
The documents concerned five students who have been targeted by the Trump administration: Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, Mohsen Mahdawi, Yunseo Chung, and Badar Khan Suri. The memos were released in response to a request by news outlets to unseal them for the public interest.
In every case, the memos showed that the administration was seeking to remove students over some form of advocacy for Palestinian rights amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
On Chung and Khalil, the State Department claimed that the two Columbia University activists posed a “potentially serious adverse” foreign policy risk — an argument which legal experts have argued is shaky at best. However, it says that officials could not identify prior cases where people were deported under these grounds, and that “courts may scrutinize the basis for these determinations” as a result.
State officials further said that the Department of Homeland Security “has not identified any alternative grounds of removability that would be applicable to Chung and Khalil.”
Despite this, the Trump administration is still trying to deport Khalil. Last week, a federal panel reversed a federal court decision to free Khalil from immigration detention. And on Thursday, DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said in an interview on NewsNation that the Trump administration is seeking to rearrest Khalil and deport him to Algeria.
This threat comes even after a federal district court judge in Boston, Reagan appointee William G. Young, slammed the administration’s campaign against the students as blatantly unconstitutional actions by the highest levels of government.
Speaking about Rubio, DHS Head Kristi Noem, and President Donald Trump, Young wrote in his decision: “Talking straight here, the big problem in this case is that the cabinet secretaries and, ostensibly, the president of the United States are not honoring the First Amendment.” Young condemned Trump as an “authoritarian.”
The case was brought by two academic groups, the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association, which brought up the cases of the students to argue that the administration was infringing upon students’ and teachers’ rights to speech as a result of their crackdown on dissent.
Disturbingly, the memos also revealed that the students were, indeed, targeted for simply exercising their rights to speech.
The memo on Öztürk, for instance, confirmed that the administration had solely targeted her for her op-ed in the Tufts University student newspaper advocating for the university to take action to support Palestinian rights. A judge ruled last month that Öztürk must be allowed to resume her studies after her visa revocation by the Trump administration, which has prevented her from teaching or participating in research.
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Sharon Zhang
Sharon Zhang is a news writer at Truthout covering politics, climate and labor. Before coming to Truthout, Sharon had written stories for Pacific Standard, The New Republic, and more. She has a master’s degree in environmental studies. She can be found on Twitter: @zhang_sharon.
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