Lawsuit filed to block Trump deportations of protesters
- 4 hours ago
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) filed a lawsuit challenging as unconstitutional the Trump administration’s actions to deport international students and scholars who protest or express support for Palestinian rights.
The lawsuit, filed on Saturday in the US District Court for the Northern District of New York, seeks a nationwide temporary restraining order to block enforcement of two executive orders signed by US President Donald Trump in the first month of his second term earlier this year.
The lawsuit comes after the detention of a Columbia University student, Mahmoud Khalil, a 30-year-old permanent US resident of Palestinian descent, whose arrest sparked protests this month.
Justice Department lawyers have argued that the US government is seeking Khalil’s removal because Secretary of State Marco Rubio has reasonable grounds to believe his activities or presence in the country could have “serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”
Rubio on Friday said the United States will likely revoke visas of more students in the coming days.
Trump vowed to deport activists who took part in protests on US college campuses against Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza following the October 2023 attack by the Palestinian group.
Rubio defended the decision to revoke Khalil’s green card on Sunday, saying that the Trump administration was revoking visas on a daily basis.
“If you tell us when you apply for a visa, ‘I’m coming to the US to participate in pro-Hamas events,’ that runs counter to the foreign policy interest of the United States of America,” Rubio said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”
“If you had told us that you were going to do that, we never would have given you the visa.”
The ADC lawsuit was filed on behalf of two graduate students and a professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who say their activism and support of the Palestinian people “has put them at serious risk of political persecution.”
“This lawsuit is a necessary step to preserve our most fundamental constitutional protections. The First Amendment guarantees the freedom of speech and expression to all persons within the United States, without exception,” said Abed Ayoub, national executive director of the ADC.
Chris Godshall-Bennett, the group’s legal director, said the litigation seeks immediate and long-term relief “to protect international students from any unconstitutional overreach that stifles free expression and deters them from fully engaging in academic and public discourse.”
The lawsuit centers on three Cornell University plaintiffs: a British-Gambian national and PhD student with a student visa; a US citizen PhD student working on plant science; and a US citizen novelist, poet, and professor in the Department of Literatures in English.
Meanwhile, Israeli military strikes have killed at least 14 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip over the past 24 hours, the enclave’s Health Ministry said on Sunday, as Arab and US mediators work to shore up a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
Palestinian officials say dozens of people have been killed by Israeli fire despite the Jan.19 truce that halted large-scale fighting in Gaza.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said most of the latest deaths took place on Saturday when an Israeli airstrike killed nine Palestinians including four journalists in the town of Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip.
The Israeli military said six men that it had identified as members of the armed wings of Hamas and the allied Islamic Jihad group had been killed in the strike. It said some of the fighters had operated “under the cover of journalists.”
Salama Marouf, the head of the Hamas-run Gaza government media office, said the military’s statement about the incident included the names of people who were not present.
It was based on inaccurate social media reports “without even bothering to verify the facts,” Marouf said.
At least four more Palestinians were killed in separate Israeli strikes on Saturday, the Gaza health officials said.
An Israeli drone had fired a missile at a group of Palestinians in the town of Juhr Eldeek in central Gaza on Sunday, killing a 62-year-old man and wounding several others, the medics said. Several others were hurt when an Israeli drone fired a missile towards a group of people in Rafah, they added.
Agencies
