A US federal judge ruled on Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s administration violated the First Amendment by attempting to deport non-citizens for protesting the conflict in Gaza.

Judge Williams of the US District Court for Massachusetts stated in his opinion that Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio acted intentionally “to chill the rights to freedom of speech and peacefully to assemble of the non-citizen plaintiff members” through “targeted deportation proceedings.” He emphasized that the First Amendment does not distinguish between citizens and non-citizens, meaning any limits on free speech apply equally. This contradicts President Trump’s Executive Order 14149, which protects only the free speech rights of American citizens.

Pro-Palestine protests have spread across US college campuses in response to Israel’s war in Gaza. Several non-citizens who participated in the protests, including Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk, were arrested, detained by ICE, and threatened with deportation. Rubio justified the arrests under § 237 (4)(c)(i) of the Immigration and Naturalization Act (INA) of 1952, which allows non-citizens to have their visa revoked and be deported if their presence would “have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” However, the act does not permit removal based solely on beliefs that are lawful within the US.

The case, American Association of University Professors v. Rubio, was brought by Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute on behalf of the Harvard, Rutgers, and New York University (NYU) chapters of the AAUP, as well as the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). Executive director of the First Amendment Institute, Jameel Jaffer, called the decision a “historic ruling,” saying it “means that the government can’t imprison people simply because it disagrees with their political views.”

A remedy hearing is to follow.