By Nate Raymond
BOSTON, Jan 15 (Reuters) – A federal judge said on Thursday he would issue an order designed to prevent President Donald Trump’s administration from exacting “retribution” against academics who challenged its arresting, detaining and deporting non-citizen, pro-Palestinian activists on U.S. college campuses.
U.S. District Judge William Young spoke at a hearing in Boston federal court, after finding in September that the U.S. departments of State and Homeland Security violated the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment by chilling free speech by the non-citizen academics on college campuses.
“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 said.
Young, who was appointed by Republican President Ronald Reagan and has criticized Trump’s other actions in the past, called the administration’s actions “appalling,” and said it had “a fearful approach to freedom.”
The judge said he would limit the reach of his order to members of academic associations including the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association that challenged the administration’s actions.
Those groups had sought an order blocking the administration’s practices nationally. Young called their proposal “overbroad” but a “sanction” was needed to remedy what he concluded was a conspiracy by top officials under Trump.
“We cast around the word ‘authoritarian,'” Young said. “I don’t, in this context, treat that in a pejorative sense, and I use it carefully, but it’s fairly clear that this president believes, as an authoritarian, that when he speaks, everyone, everyone in Article II is going to toe the line absolutely.”
Young said he would instead issue an order establishing a presumption that any change to the immigration status of those groups’ members was in retribution for their participation in the case and require the government to prove in court it was seeking to deport them for other, “appropriate” reasons.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; editing by Deepa Babington)
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