For Documented, Anna Oakes writes that rulings in high-profile cases targeting noncitizen university students who have engaged in pro-Palestine speech, like those of Mohsen Mahdawi and Rümeysa Öztürk, could redefine First Amendment protections.
ANNA OAKES; [email protected]
Oakes is an independent journalist based in New York City.
Oakes told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “For the past two years, I was studying at Columbia University. In the first year [after October 7], the encampments began, but in the second year, we saw a subtle but more powerful response of the university to protests. The administration and trustees have retaliated against their own students and ICE has arrested students. The Columbia administration has capitulated to and cooperated with the Trump administration… These cases are continuing and expanding in their scope.
“We are now seeing this push by federal authorities to use immigration law to restrict First Amendment rights. This is an interesting intersection of two types of law that should be very separate, but have historically overlapped––usually with the purpose of restricting First Amendment rights. These cases have evolved into real constitutional challenges that put both international immigrants and noncitizens at risk. It’s about U.S. citizens, too, but regardless of that, noncitizens are protected by the First Amendment. The attorneys I have spoken to say that when you start making the arguments the Justice Department is using in restricting immigrant speech, the more and more you make them, they snowball.
“One motivation of these high-profile cases is a suppression of speech. Noncitizen journalists can put their visas at risk [by reporting on these issues].” Oakes writes that a newly proposed Trump administration rule suggests cutting non-citizen U.S. journalists’ visas from five years to 240 days. “That brings more precarity into journalism, and creates a new administrative burden. It’s expensive to apply [for such visas]… Many of these high-profile cases are about university students. The universities are an important battleground, but journalists as well as regular people are also impacted.
“Mainstream media focuses disproportionately on the impact on U.S. citizens. Even in the ICE raids [last month] on Canal Street [in New York City], a lot of the reporting focused on the four U.S. citizens who were detained. But meanwhile, there are nine West African vendors who have been detained and will probably be deported, though they have legal status.”