Reagan-Appointed Judge Slams Trump's Crackdown on Pro-Palestinian Students

Judge William Young wrote a book-length order attacking “the problem this President has with the First Amendment.”

President Donald Trump often channels former President Ronald Reagan, down to his signature slogan, "make America great again." But Judge William Young, who was appointed by Reagan himself, cited Reagan's legacy as a total rebuke to Trump's ruling philosophy. "Freedom is a fragile thing and it's never more than one generation away from extinction," Young wrote in a ruling filed on Tuesday, quoting a speech by Reagan.

"I've come to believe that President Trump truly understands and appreciates the full import of President Reagan's inspiring message—yet I fear he has drawn from it a darker, more cynical message," Young warned. "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."

Young's ruling came in response to one of the Trump administration's signature policies, its attempts to shut down Palestinian solidarity protests by deporting Palestinian students and their supporters. The American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association sued a few days after the arrest of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, arguing that the policy violates freedom of speech, both by intimidating foreign academics in America and preventing American academics "from hearing from, and associating with, their noncitizen students and colleagues."

Ruling that administration officials indeed "acted in concert to misuse the sweeping powers of their respective offices to target non-citizen pro-Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their First Amendment protected political speech," Young promised to hold a hearing on the specific measures he will order. He wrote that "it will not do simply to order the Public Officials to cease and desist in the future," given the current political environment.

What seems to have set off Young was a postcard from a hater: "Trump has pardons and tanks…What do you have?" Young attached a photocopy of the postcard to the top of his ruling, and dedicated the ruling to disproving the writer. "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," he wrote, inviting the letter writer to visit his courthouse at the end of the ruling.

The ruling itself meticulously outlined how several different activists—Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, Mohsen Mahdawi, Yunseo Chung, and Badar Khan Suri—were targeted for deportation and how the administration justified it, both internally and publicly. Although Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeatedly claimed in the media that the deportations were meant to target "riots" on campus, Young shows that the students were often targeted based on their opinions alone, with vague chains of association linking them to violent protests.

For example, the Department of Homeland Security noted in an intelligence analysis that "Hamas flyers" were handed out during a March 2025 protest that Khalil and Chung attended. But as Young pointed out, there was "neither an allegation nor evidence" that either Khalil or Chung themselves were involved in distributing the flyers.

In another case, Öztürk was a member of Graduate Students for Palestine. Because that group cosigned a call for boycotting Israel with Students for Justice in Palestine, a group that was banned from Tufts University for allegedly using violent imagery, the Department of Homeland Security's intelligence analysts tried to tie Öztürk to Students for Justice in Palestine, which she was not a member of. Young, exasperated, called the logic "hard to follow."

He wrote that "there is no evidence that Öztürk did anything but co-author an op-ed that criticized the University's position on investments with Israel, that she criticized Israel, and that the organization of which she was member joined in that criticism with an organization that was banned on Tufts campus, with which she was not affiliated."

Particularly striking was the way that the administration used anonymous online blacklists as a basis for investigation. In March 2025, the Department of Homeland Security ordered its intelligence office to review all 5,000 names on Canary Mission, a controversial website that lists allegedly antisemitic students, Assistant Director Peter Hatch testified. The office also relied on names provided by Betar, an Israeli nationalist organization that has bragged about getting its opponents deported, Hatch testified.

"Those names that were passed up the chain of command by the investigating subordinates were almost universally approved for adverse action, and, again, the reasons for being passed up the chain of command included any form of online suggestion that one was 'pro-Hamas,' including Canary Mission's own anonymous articles," Young wrote.

The judge directly addressed Rubio's claim that, because a visa or green card is a privilege, the government has unlimited power to remove non-citizens.

"This Court in part must agree: non-citizens are, indeed, in a sense our guests. How we treat our guests is a question of constitutional scope, because who we are as a people and as a nation is an important part of how we must interpret the fundamental laws that constrain us. We are not, and we must not become, a nation that imprisons and deports people because we are afraid of what they have to tell us," he wrote.

And, Young argued, the decision to go after students for activism they did before Trump took office made the policy especially "arbitrary" and "capricious." Students across America "have all been made to understand that there are certain things that it may be gravely dangerous for them to say or do, but have not been told precisely what those things are," he wrote, noting that many of the arrests were designed to be as intimidating as possible.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents snatched Öztürk off the street while wearing masks. "ICE goes masked for a single reason—to terrorize Americans into quiescence," Young wrote, calling ICE officials "disingenuous, squalid and dishonorable" for trying to argue otherwise. "In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police. Carrying on in this fashion, ICE brings indelible obloquy to this administration and everyone who works in it," he added, citing Abraham Lincoln.

Young moved from a discussion of the case into a broadside against the way immigration enforcement is used in America.

"ICE has nothing whatever to do with criminal law enforcement and seeks to avoid the actual criminal courts at all costs. It is carrying a civil law mandate passed by our Congress and pressed to its furthest reach by the President. Even so, it drapes itself in the public's understanding of the criminal law though its 'warrants' are but unreviewed orders from an ICE superior and its 'immigration courts' are not true courts at all but hearings before officers who cannot challenge the legal interpretations they are given," he wrote.

The Department of Homeland Security responded publicly to Young's ruling—ironically, by accusing him of dangerous speech. "It's disheartening that even after the terrorist attack and recent arrests of rioters with guns outside of ICE facilities, this judge decides to stoke the embers of hatred," department spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement, accusing Young of "smearing and demonizing federal law enforcement."