NYU’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which sued the federal government last week for its detainment of noncitizens on college campuses protesting the war in Gaza, asked a Massachusetts court on Tuesday to block the Trump administration from carrying out mass arrests and deportations of student and faculty protesters during the ongoing lawsuit.
The March 25 complaint — in conjunction with AAUP chapters at Harvard University and Rutgers University, as well as the Middle East Studies Association — claims the government has arbitrarily discriminated against noncitizens and created a “climate of repression and fear” on university campuses. It specifically challenges the detainments of nine pro-Palestinian protesters over the last three weeks, including Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk.
“It’s not only the people, in this case noncitizens, being silenced with these threats that are harmed — but their students, their colleagues, everybody else at the university is harmed when those people are silenced,” CAS professor Sonya Posmentier told WSN. “The complaint hinges on this important part of the First Amendment that guarantees our right to listen.”
CAS professor Zachary Samalin, and vice president of NYU AAUP, also said President Donald Trump, along with the Department of Homeland Security and Department of State, has infringed upon people’s right to hear from others expressing dissenting positions. The lawsuit argues that restraints on speech have compromised the quality of professors’ work and students’ educational development.
In a statement to WSN, a senior DHS spokesperson said that “taking over buildings, defacing private property and harassing Jewish students” does not constitute free speech and that “it is a privilege to be granted a visa” to study in the United States. A State Department spokesperson declined to comment due to pending litigation.
The complaint criticizes President Donald Trump’s characterization of protests against Israel’s ongoing siege in Gaza as “pro-Hamas” and “antisemitic,” stipulating that his administration has “stretched the label beyond the breaking point.” Talya Nevins — a legal fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, the group that filed last week’s complaint — said this conflation has been used to justify retaliation against students who have engaged in pro-Palestinian advocacy, scholarship and other forms of protected expression.
“It’s having an enormous effect on the ability of noncitizen and citizen students and faculty alike to pursue their research, to learn and speak freely in the classroom, to attend protests and engage in advocacy together,” Nevins said.
Salamin said that he encouraged NYU to also sue the federal government, adding that despite having “incredible power,” the university has yet to criticize Trump’s immigration crackdown. He referenced the university’s involvement in 2017 lawsuits that challenged the administration’s 90-day suspension of U.S. travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries. The university had said the executive order would “unlawfully encumber” its global site offerings and ability to support international students.
In a statement detailing its interest in joining the lawsuit, NYU had said the executive order “improperly compromises the diversity that is central to NYU’s identity” and that more than 120 students at the university were from the countries facing travel bans. It said the travel ban would hinder the university’s academic programming related to Middle Eastern studies and “deprive NYU of opportunities to share those key democratic traditions.”
“This is a kind of suit that could have been brought by NYU,” Samalin said. “What we’re seeing this time is that the NYU administration, and nearly all university administrations, have completely abdicated responsibility for protecting their students and their faculty from the obvious harms that are that we’re seeing.”
Posmentier said members of NYU AAUP have spoken with NYU leadership regarding potential pushback against Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech, but that the conversations were unproductive. She also criticized the university’s student conduct policy’s citation of “code words, like ‘Zionist,’” as potentially discriminatory speech for “dangerous” conflation of pro-Palestinian protest with antisemitic harassment.
NYU is currently one of 10 universities facing scrutiny from the Department of Justice’s Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism. The university was not, however, named in a more recent list of 60 colleges slated for investigations by the Department of Education as a result of antisemitism complaints.
Contact Yezen Saadah at [email protected].
