Trump DOJ attorney waffles on whether free speech applies to legal US residents

An attorney with President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice walked back claims Monday that the First Amendment applies to legal residents, defending the Trump administration’s efforts to arrest and deport legal immigrants for pro-Palestinian speech and advocacy.

Victoria Santora, a trial attorney in the DOJ’s Office of Immigration, is representing the Trump administration in a First Amendment lawsuit over the arrests of five legal immigrant students – including Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil – for their pro-Palestinian advocacy, something Secretary of State Marco Rubio has declared to be a threat to the nation’s foreign policy.

At a federal courtroom in Boston, Santora, at least initially, appeared to support the idea that the First Amendment applies to everyone legally in the United States.

“People in the United States share the same rights under the First Amendment,” Santora said, Politico reported.

After several minutes, however, Santora would soon walk that claim back.

“The answer, I think, is not necessarily based on their status in the country,” she said. “There are nuances to the First Amendment… national security, foreign policy, immigration enforcement and enforcement discretion.”

A permanent resident and green card holder, Khalil was the lead organizer of the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, and despite never being charged with a crime, was arrested in March by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The Trump administration would go on to defend the arrest by arguing his advocacy constituted a threat to U.S. foreign policy, specifically the country’s stated foreign policy goal of combating antisemitism.

Since then, several other legal residents have been arrested for deportation over pro-Palestinian advocacy, including Turkish citizen Rumeysa Ozturk, who was studying in Massachusetts on a student visa, for having co-authored an op-ed in her student newspaper criticizing Israel’s ongoing siege on Gaza.

While all of those arrested without charge based solely on their pro-Palestinian activism have since been released from custody, the Trump administration is expected to mount an aggressive legal campaign to back its efforts of quashing pro-Palestinian dissent among foreign-born residents.

Judge William Young, the federal judge presiding over the case, however, cast doubt that the Trump administration had any legal leg to stand on, at least on the trial's first day.

“The president ran on a policy of immigration enforcement, which he’s attempting to carry out and whether individuals support that or oppose that, that all that seems to me political speech,” Young said Monday in his Boston courtroom.