Trump Cabinet secretaries conspired to violate Constitution, judge says

Old_Joe

Following are excerpts from a current report in The Washington Post:

“The Cabinet secretaries and, ostensibly, the president of the United States, are not honoring the First Amendment,” U.S. District Judge William Young declared.

A federal judge Thursday decried what he said were “breathtaking” constitutional violations by senior Trump administration officials and called the president an “authoritarian” who expects everyone in the executive branch to “toe the line absolutely.” In remarks laced with outrage and disbelief, U.S. District Judge William Young said Donald Trump and top officials have a “fearful approach” to freedom of speech that would seek to “exclude from participation everyone who doesn’t agree with them.”

Young, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan, leveled the searing critique during a hearing in Boston to determine the appropriate remedies for the administration’s detentions of pro-Palestinian students last year. The judge had ruled in September that senior administration officials engaged in an illegal effort to arrest and deport noncitizen students based on their activism.

On Thursday, he again denounced the administration’s conduct in unusually stark terms. “Talking straight here,” he said. “The big problem in this case is that the Cabinet secretaries and, ostensibly, the president of the United States, are not honoring the First Amendment.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio engaged in an “unconstitutional conspiracy” to deprive people of their rights, Young said. “The secretary of state,” he said, his voice full of incredulity, “the senior Cabinet officer in our history, involved in this.

On Thursday evening, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said via email that “it’s bizarre that this judge is broadcasting his intent to engage in left-wing activism against the democratically-elected President of the United States.” Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, said in an email that “there is no room in the United States for the rest of the world’s terrorist sympathizers.” A spokesperson for Rubio did not respond to a request for comment.

The plaintiffs in the case are the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association. The groups of scholars accused the administration of having an unconstitutional policy of deporting people based on their political views, a policy intended to chill the free-speech rights of their members. The trial last summer focused on the targeting of five noncitizen students and scholars.

All but one who obtained a restraining order before ICE could find her were arrested. The other four were released on the orders of federal judges, but the Trump administration is still trying to deport them. On Thursday, an appellate court in Philadelphia overturned a lower-court ruling in one case on jurisdictional grounds, raising the possibility that he could be rearrested.

While Young condemned the administration’s actions Thursday, he indicated that he would not grant the sweeping relief proposed by the plaintiffs, who had sought an injunction barring such conduct and a variety of monitoring and reporting requirements. Young said he expected to issue a more narrowly tailored order next Thursday, one that would protect the noncitizen members of the plaintiff groups from changes to their immigration status except in certain defined circumstances.

The 2025 trial revealed the machinery behind the Trump administration’s campus crackdown. Senior administration officials directed personnel at DHS who normally analyze transnational criminal networks to instead produce reports on students involved in pro-Palestinian protests, one official testified. The analysts relied heavily on thousands of profiles generated by Canary Mission, an opaque pro-Israel group that says it documents individuals who “promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews” on college campuses. Working largely from Canary Mission’s list, Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of ICE, generated between 100 and 200 reports on student protesters, the official testified.

DHS then referred dozens of such reports to the State Department, recommending that it revoke the visas and green cards of those students and scholars, paving the way for their removal. Within weeks, some were arrested by masked agents in plainclothes and flown to detention facilities in Louisiana and Texas.

Officials and agents from Homeland Security Investigations testified that they had never been asked to compile reports on student protesters before 2025, nor to arrest noncitizen students because their immigration status had changed.

Note: Text emphasis in the above report was added.

Comment:   Trump Cabinet secretaries conspired to violate Constitution! Shocking... I would never have guessed that they would be doing anything like that.