A left-wing group representing the interests of Arab-Americans filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration in an attempt to stop the deportations of students involved in anti-Israel protests.
The American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee (ADC) filed a lawsuit Saturday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York, seeking to block the Trump administration’s efforts to repatriate foreign students involved the anti-Israel protests that swept many college campuses in 2024, according to court documents. The White House has argued that the students detained and deported so far have been involved in anti-Semitic activity aligned with the Hamas terrorist group, and immigration experts say the actions are not related to free speech.
The lawsuit specifically seeks a nationwide injunction against two separate executive orders signed by President Donald Trump authorizing the removal of foreign students involved in the protests. The ADC, which argues the orders “unconstitutionally” infringe on free speech, sued on behalf of three Cornell University plaintiffs — two students and one professor.
“The First Amendment guarantees the freedom of speech and expression to all persons within the United States, without exception,” Abed Ayoub, ADC’s National Executive Director, said in a press release. “By targeting and punishing students who have spoken up in support of Palestine — or otherwise engaged in lawful protest —the Administration’s extreme Orders threaten to silence entire communities and unlawfully single out international students who contribute significantly to our academic, social, and economic institutions.”
The ADC, which bills itself as an Arab-American civil rights organization, has been an outspoken opponent of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement policies and a longtime critic of Israel, according to a review of the organization’s press releases. On the day of the Oct. 7 2023 massacre — in which Hamas terrorists killed over 1,000 people and took hundreds of civilians hostage — the ADC referred to the attack as an act of “Palestinian resistance” and blamed Israel for the terrorist group’s actions.
The group’s latest lawsuit comes days after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian-born Palestinian activist who was behind campus protests at Columbia University.
Throughout 2024, anti-Israel protesters at Columbia University unlawfully occupied campus property and became so aggressive that the school was eventually forced to cancel in-person classes, call off its university-wide commencement ceremony and even call the police to make arrests. Khalil — a graduate student living in the U.S. on a non-immigrant student visa at the time — positioned himself early on as a leader of the Columbia protests, speaking to media outlets and serving as an intermediary between the school and the demands of the campus activists.
Trump, having already promised a crack down on the law-breaking protesters, signed two separate executive orders aimed at detaining and removing foreign students involved in extremist activity. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said it was acting on those orders when it arrested Khalil, and claimed he participated in activities aligned with Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.
ICE agents also arrested Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian from the West Bank who remained in the U.S. after her student visa expired, for her alleged involvement in campus protests at Columbia University. Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian national also allegedly involved in the protests at Columbia, had her student visa revoked by the State Department and left the U.S. via the Trump administration’s self-deportation app.
Activists sympathetic to Khalil have heavily decried his arrest, going so far to occupy Trump Tower and holding rallies in New York City.
However, both the State Department and immigration experts have pointed out that the actions have nothing to do with “free speech” and the administration has the authority to deport foreign nationals who potentially pose a foreign policy threat.
“This is definitely not a free speech issue,” Matt O’Brien, investigations director for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, previously said to the Daily Caller News Foundation. O’Brien, who formerly served as an immigration judge, pointed to a section in U.S. code that states, “An alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable grounds to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.”
Speaking to reporters earlier this month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued that the case has nothing to do with free speech, but about foreign nationals who do not have a right to be in the U.S. No one has a right to a student visa, nor does anyone have a right to a green card, the Secretary of State said.
“So when you apply for a student visa or any visa to enter the United States, we have a right to deny you for virtually any reason, but I think being a supporter of Hamas and coming into our universities and turning them upside down and being complicit in what are clearly crimes of vandalization, complicit in shutting down learning institutions – there are kids at these schools that can’t go to class,” Rubio said.
“If you told us that’s what you intended to do when you came to America, we would have never let you in,” he continued.
DHS didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
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