The Trump administration violated the Constitution when it moved to deport international students or revoke their visas for speaking up for Palestinian rights and criticizing Israel's genocide in Gaza, a federal judge ruled on Friday.

Judge Noël Wise of the Northern District of California, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, found that the administration's actions violated both the First Amendment, which protects free speech, and the Fifth Amendment, which guarantees due process.

"Stated plainly, in the United States, freedom of speech belongs to the people. It is not the government's to take," Wise wrote.

Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement early in the second Trump administration despite holding a green card, welcomed the ruling on Saturday. Khalil's March 2025 arrest made him one of the most prominent targets of the administration's crackdown on pro-Palestinian activism on university campuses, a campaign in which the State Department said it had reviewed thousands of student visas and revoked hundreds.

"A federal judge just ruled that the Trump admin's use of immigration law to deport me and other noncitizen students for pro-Palestinian speech is unconstitutional. No one should fear speaking up for Palestine," Khalil wrote on social media.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations also hailed the decision in a statement on Saturday:

This ruling reaffirms a fundamental American principle that the government cannot deport people simply because it dislikes their political views. Students do not surrender their constitutional rights at the classroom door, and international students do not surrender their freedom of expression when they come to study in the United States. Criticizing the policies of a foreign government, including the genocidal government of Israel, is protected political speech.

The lawsuit was brought by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) in August 2025 on behalf of The Stanford Daily, Stanford University's student newspaper, and an anonymous female plaintiff. The newspaper argued that student reporters on visas refrained from covering pro-Palestinian protests on campus out of fear of deportation, while the Jane Doe plaintiff was a noncitizen who had spoken out on behalf of Palestine and now feared government retaliation.

"The reporters in our newsroom shouldn't have to fear that writing a story will result in their deportation. Today's victory means they won't have to," the paper's editor-in-chief, George Porteous, wrote on social media on Friday.

The lawsuit specifically challenged two provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act that Secretary of State Marco Rubio used to justify seeking the deportations of Khalil, Columbia student Moshen Mahdawi, and Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk. The first provision allows the secretary of state to deport a noncitizen for speech if the secretary "personally determines" the speech "compromises a compelling foreign policy interest." The second allows the secretary to revoke visas entirely at their own discretion. The case is one of several legal challenges to the administration's actions against noncitizen students and activists, and the ruling's reach may ultimately depend on how appeals courts and, potentially, the Supreme Court resolve the questions it raises.

Wise agreed that the provisions violated the Constitution and offered a forceful defense of free speech.

"In the United States, free speech, including the freedom to criticize the government and its leaders, is not a sign of our democracy's fragility. It is evidence of its strength," she wrote. "That strength is diminished when members of our society—citizens and noncitizens alike—must self-censor and 'behave' or suffer the government's retaliation."

FIRE said the decision was the "first in the country to squarely rule on the constitutionality of these statutes" and that it would "reverberate in similar proceedings around the country."

"In America, free speech doesn't just belong to the people who say things the government agrees with," FIRE attorney Conor Fitzpatrick said in a statement Friday. "Today's ruling proves that free speech isn't a privilege, but the inalienable right of every man, woman, and child."