Noem, Rubio Slammed for ‘Breathtaking’ Free Speech Plot

A Boston federal judge said he was struck by a “breathtaking” conspiracy involving Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to violate international students’ free speech rights as the court outlined a remedy.

Concluding in his view “one of the most important cases” ever heard in the court, Judge William G. Young railed against the cabinet secretaries’ participation in the government’s efforts to target non-citizen students and scholars for their protected pro-Palestine or anti-Israel speech.

“The big problem in this is: It’s that the cabinet secretaries and ostensibly the president of the United States are not honoring the First Amendment,” Young said, extending his review of his findings to the White House.

Young declined to hit the government with a broad injunction, but he said he would issue an order that would give noncitizen members of the academic groups that sued the government a “conclusive presumption” that any change to their immigration status was in retaliation for being involved in the litigation.

The government could overcome that presumption by providing evidence that it had appropriate reason to adjust the immigration status of the person who was a member of the American Association of University Professors or the Middle East Studies Association when it sued in March, the judge said.

In his lengthy September order, Young ruled the government’s arrest and removal of international students who expressed pro-Palestinian views violated their free speech rights. He said Noem and Rubio misused their office’s “sweeping powers” to “strike fear” into noncitizens to curb their protected political speech.

Young indicated he had no interest in an injunction that would have him indefinitely police the government’s conduct and is barred by the US Supreme Court’s limits on universal injunctions from applying the ruling beyond the parties here.

He told Department of Justice lawyer Paul Stone that the proposed order largely aligned with the government’s request for “care and restraint” in ordering any remedy. But the court’s inventive solution didn’t prove sufficient.

Stone said federal immigration law stands as a bar to such an order, which would trample on the system of administrative immigration courts that Congress put in place to adjudicate removals. The Department of Justice lawyer said the government’s position is no remedy should be entered.

Young sharply retorted: “The Secretary of Homeland Security in concert with the Secretary of State, approved by the President of the United States to violate the Constitutional rights of these people and you’re telling me there is no remedy? I respectfully disagree.”

He said the burden the order would put on the government was designed specifically because the “cabinet secretaries have failed in their sworn duty to uphold the Constitution.”

Young, in his 47th year on the bench, opined on what caused the government to end up running an “unconstitutional conspiracy to pick off” noncitizen academics to chill their political speech.

“The record in this case convinces me that these high officials, and I include the President of the United States have a fearful view of freedom,” Young said. “A view that defines the freedom here in the United States by who’s excluded. It seems obvious from this record, these high officials for one thing are seeking to exclude everyone. It’s erroneous.”

The judge said he expects to issue the remedies ruling on Jan. 22.

AAUP is represented by Sher Tremonte LLP, Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, and Zimmer Citron & Clarke LLP.

The case is Am. Ass’n of Univ. Professors v. Rubio, D. Mass., No. 1:25-cv-10685, hearing held 1/15/26.