The New Yorker:

In Boston, a Reagan appointee is on pace to get to the bottom of the campaign against Mahmoud Khalil and others the Administration wants to deport over their activism.

By Cristian Farias

In April, U.S. District Judge William Young, who sits in Boston, made a procedural ruling from the bench that seemed to catch the lawyers in the courtroom by surprise. Like many other judges these days, Young had convened a hearing to consider whether to grant a preliminary injunction—which, in the normal course, would put a quick stop to an illegal or otherwise unconstitutional government policy. By one count, in the first seventy days of Donald Trump’s Presidency, forty-six judges across the country have issued this kind of order, preventing the Administration from forging ahead with its move-fast-and-break-things style of governance. The purpose behind these orders is to prevent imminent, irreparable harm to the plaintiffs and allow courts additional time to assess the legality of the challenged action.

But Judge Young had other ideas. “Pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(a),” he announced in open court, “further hearing on the motion for a preliminary injunction is combined with trial on the merits.” In other words, he wouldn’t simply grant short-term relief and kick the can down the road. There would be a trial, and it would happen fast—which meant that depositions, document productions, case-management conferences, and other minutiae would all go down in a couple of months’ time before proceedings began sometime in the summer. That choice set in motion what can be fairly described as the most consequential and far-reaching trial of the second Trump Presidency: American Association of University Professors et al. v. Marco Rubio—or A.A.U.P. v. Rubio, for short—challenges the Administration’s systematic campaign to arrest, disappear, detain, and deport pro-Palestinian student protesters and advocates.

The targets of this shocking crusade, all of them noncitizen visa holders or lawful permanent residents who have spoken out against the war in Gaza, are well known by now, some more than others: Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, Mohsen Mahdawi, Yunseo Chung, Badar Khan Suri. All of them landed on the government’s radar, and were pursued by ice, at around the same time in March and April. All of them contend that the government sought to deport them on the basis of their constitutionally protected antiwar speech, and have won back or secured their freedom from immigration detention in the process. Yet this freedom—and their freedom to remain in the U.S.—is tenuous. The government still wants Khalil and the other students reincarcerated, back in immigration court, or else fighting for their chance to remain or study in the U.S. in highly complex legal proceedings.

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