Federal Judge Rules Visa Revocations Targeting Pro-Palestinian Speech Unconstitutional

A federal judge in California has declared that the Trump administration’s use of immigration statutes to revoke visas and launch deportation proceedings against noncitizen students for pro-Palestinian advocacy violates the Constitution.

U.S. District Judge Noel Wise in San Jose issued a scathing decision Friday condemning the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security for wielding provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act to target non-citizens for removal based on viewpoints the government sought to suppress. Wise, a Biden appointee, emphasized that in the United States, the freedom to criticize the government and its leaders is a hallmark of democratic strength.

“That strength is diminished when members of our society — citizens and noncitizens alike — must self-censor and ‘behave’ or suffer the government’s retaliation,” she wrote.

The State Department and DHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The ruling centers on actions beginning in March 2025, when the administration started revoking visas and detaining non-citizens engaged in pro-Palestinian campus advocacy, starting with the arrest of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, who is separately contesting his deportation.

Those arrests prompted a lawsuit filed in August 2025 by The Stanford Daily, the university’s student newspaper. The paper alleged that several of its writers on student visas had stopped covering pro-Palestinian protests and Middle East-related topics out of fear of the administration’s policies.

Attorneys for the newspaper argued that two provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act — one allowing Secretary of State Marco Rubio to deem noncitizens deportable if he personally determines their actions “compromise a compelling foreign policy interest,” and another granting him discretion to revoke visas — violated the First and Fifth Amendments as applied to protected speech.

Judge Wise agreed. She found that when a noncitizen’s speech drives a visa revocation and deportation decision, “the government is singling out that speech for disfavored treatment based on its viewpoint or content.”

Conor Fitzpatrick of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which represented the student newspaper, called the ruling proof that “free speech isn’t a privilege, but the inalienable right of every man, woman, and child.”

The decision mirrors a 2024 ruling by U.S. District Judge William Young in Boston, who similarly found the administration’s policy of revoking visas, arresting, detaining, and deporting foreign students and faculty for pro-Palestinian advocacy to be unconstitutional.

Wise warned that the administration’s approach risked expanding beyond its current targets. She cautioned that eventually “targets may include anyone in the United States who exercises their freedom of speech to simply express opinions the government does not like.”

“This downward spiral is antithetical to our Constitution that recognizes our right to speak freely,” she wrote. “Here you can simultaneously hate the content of a person’s speech and love the country that cherishes the freedom to allow it.”

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