The Harvard chapter of the American Association of University Professors filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on Tuesday morning for allegedly violating its members’ First Amendment rights by arresting and attempting to deport noncitizens for expressing pro-Palestine views.
The suit — which the Harvard AAUP chapter filed with the Middle East Studies Association, the AAUP, and AAUP chapters at New York University and Rutgers University — argued that the arrests violated their right to hear from noncitizen students and professors.
The First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech, also guarantees Americans the right to receive information regardless of the source and bars the government from preventing citizens from freely accessing such information.
“Because the ideological-deportation policy abridges these rights without adequate justification, the policy is unconstitutional,” the complaint argued.
The plaintiffs contended that the Trump administration’s policies make it “practically impossible” for them to participate in political expression alongside their noncitizen peers or benefit from their academic insights.
“By design, the agencies’ policy has created a climate of repression and fear on university campuses,” they wrote in the complaint.
The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts and assigned to Judge William G. Young ’62, a Ronald Reagan nominee.
History professor Maya R. Jasanoff ’96 and History and Literature lecturer Lauren Kaminsky, who both said the Trump policy on freedom of speech has impeded their research and work, both included declarations in the complaint. Kaminsky specifically said several noncitizen faculty had opted against joining the AAUP in recent weeks because they feared their membership could make them future targets of the Trump administration.
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has arrested and revoked visas from several international students and faculty associated with pro-Palestine causes.
Mahmoud Khalil, a leading pro-Palestine organizer at Columbia, was arrested on March 8 and is currently detained in Louisiana while he sues to block his deportation. Several other international students and faculty have had their visas revoked, including Georgetown University postdoctoral fellow Badar Khan Suri, Cornell University Ph.D. student Momodou Taal, Columbia student Yunseo Chung, and Columbia student and NYU adjunct professor Ranjani Srinivasan, whose cases were cited in the complaint.
The moves follow months of threats from Trump and his administration. In a fact sheet accompanying a January executive order, White House officials promised to “quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”
The order urged universities to monitor international students for suspected participation in crime or terrorism and followed a series of threats to cancel the visas of student protesters.
Two weeks ago, the AAUP organized a demonstration that drew nearly 200 Harvard affiliates to protest Khalil’s arrest and call for Harvard to take a more assertive stance against Trump’s attacks on universities.
The president of Harvard’s AAUP chapter, History professor Kirsten A. Weld, slammed the Trump administration in an interview Tuesday for the “chilling effect” its new arrest and deportation policies have wrought on university campuses.
“The chilling of the speech of that significant portion of our community deprives everyone in our community of the right to receive and to hear the ideas, the thoughts, the opinions, the interventions of those noncitizens,” Weld said.
The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Its plaintiffs are represented by the Cambridge law firm Zimmer, Citron, & Clarke.
The AAUP also sued the Trump administration on Tuesday over its freezing of and demands to restore Columbia’s federal funding.
The lawsuit’s lead defendants are U.S. Secretary of State Marco A. Rubio, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and Acting Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Todd M. Lyons.
The plaintiffs claimed that in addition to violating the First Amendment, the Trump administration’s policy breaches the Fifth Amendment — which protects due process rights — because it imposes “arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.”
“They fail to give noncitizen students and faculty fair warning as to what speech and association the government believes to be grounds for arrest, detention, and deportation,” the complaint argued.
The complaint also argued that the policy is “an abuse of discretion” and therefore violates the Administrative Procedure Act, which specifically forbids federal agencies from instituting “arbitrary or capricious” policies.
History and African and African American Studies professor Vincent A. Brown, who serves on the executive committee for Harvard’s AAUP chapter, said in a press release that the Trump administration’s actions jeopardize the core missions of U.S. universities.
“The abduction, caging, and deportation of noncitizen students on ideological grounds threatens the university’s purpose and function because the pursuit of knowledge cannot prosper in a climate of fear and repression,” Brown said.
Corrections: March 25, 2025
A previous version of this article misquoted History professor Kirsten A. Weld as referring to the “killing of the speech” of noncitizens on campus. In fact, Weld referred to the “chilling” of such speech.
A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to History professor Maya R. Jasanoff ’96 and History and Literature lecturer Lauren Kaminsky as plaintiffs. In fact, Jasanoff and Kaminsky are members of plaintiff organizations, but they are declarants, not plaintiffs, in the suit.
A previous version of this piece incorrectly stated that the plaintiffs were represented by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. In fact, they are represented by an attorney from the law firm Zimmer, Citron, & Clarke.
—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.
—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.