It’s been three days since the government arrested and detained Mahmoud Khalil for deportation. This afternoon, the administration finally stated the basis for its actions. Its explanation threatens the free speech of millions of people.
Yesterday, an administration official told The Free Press, “The allegation here is not that [Khalil] was breaking the law.” This was confirmed today by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who announced Khalil is being targeted under a law that she characterized as allowing the secretary of state to personally deem individuals “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States of America.”
Leavitt said Khalil “sid[ed] with terrorists,” “organized group protests” that “disrupted college campus classes and harassed Jewish American students and made them feel unsafe,” and distributed “pro-Hamas propaganda.” She also said the Department of Homeland Security is trying to track down “other individuals who have engaged in pro-Hamas activity” at Columbia University.
The law Leavitt appears to be citing requires the secretary of state to have “reasonable ground to believe” the person’s “presence or activities in the United States . . . would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
The administration is wielding this standard — deportation for people whose activities could cause “serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States” — to arrest and detain an individual graduate student. In explaining how he met this standard, the administration did not allege Khalil committed a crime. But it did explicitly cite the content of his speech, characterizing it as “anti-American” and “pro-Hamas.” Protesting government policy is protected by the First Amendment, as is rhetorical support for a terrorist group (if not directly coordinated with it, which the government has not alleged here).
Disrupting college classes and harassing students is not protected expression, to be sure, and Leavitt stated that Khalil organized protests that may have done so. But the administration has not detailed Khalil’s specific actions with respect to those protests, so it remains unclear whether Khalil himself violated any campus rules against discriminatory harassment. Whether any such violation justifies detention and deportation is a separate question. In either adjudication, Khalil must be afforded due process.
There are millions of people lawfully present in the United States without citizenship. The administration’s actions will cause them to self-censor rather than risk government retaliation. Lawful permanent residents and students on visas will fear a knock on the door simply for speaking their minds.
If constitutionally protected speech may render someone deportable by the secretary of state, the administration has free rein to arrest and detain any non-citizen whose speech the government dislikes. The inherent vagueness of the “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests” standard does not provide notice as to what speech is or is not prohibited. The administration’s use of it will foster a culture of self-censorship and fear.
This is America. We don’t throw people in detention centers because of their politics. Doing so betrays our national commitment to freedom of speech.
FIRE social media post about the government’s detention of Mahmoud Khalil, March 10, 2025.
It’s no secret that politicians are getting more involved in higher education. And while some level of involvement with how colleges and universities operate is appropriate given the amount of taxpayer money spent on campuses, nobody should be surprised to learn that greater political involvement can pose academic freedom risks.
Last Monday, for example, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the creation of Florida’s own Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), named after the Trump Administration’s Elon Musk-led initiative to cut federal spending. The Florida task force is to conduct “a deep dive into all facets of college and university operations and spending and make recommendations to the Board of Governors and State Board of Education to eliminate any wasteful spending.”
There are viewpoint-based decisions that governors and legislatures have to make about colleges as part of the political and appropriations process. But the more granular those decisions, the more they threaten to substitute academic judgment with political judgment.
During his live announcement, DeSantis expanded on what he called “the DOGE-ing of our state university system,” saying it would include “examining courses, programming, and staff” with an aim towards helping students gain “meaningful employment.” But the governor also, troublingly, made clear that he’s continuing to take aim at a particular set of viewpoints:
[S]ome of the ideological studies stuff, we just want to prune that and get that out, and we want to make sure that these universities are really serving the classical mission of what a university should be. And that’s not to impose ideology.
Politicians have long complained about taxpayer money spent on what they see as frivolous academic pursuits — the proverbial degree in “underwater basket weaving” — but what DeSantis posits goes further. This task force won’t simply be focused on (say) eliminating majors that offer no real job prospects. Rather, it will seek out courses involving “ideological studies stuff,” presumably by reviewing course descriptions or syllabi, that in the task force’s view is not worth teaching.
That’s not just an invitation to viewpoint discrimination — it’s an explicit mandate.
It’s not hard to see how this could threaten academic freedom by pressuring faculty members to substitute state-level politics for their academic judgment.
For example, let’s say the University of Florida’s Chinese Studies department decides that, to understand contemporary China, students need to take a class on Marxist-Leninist political thought. It’s easy to see how this could be relevant given that China is a Communist country. It’s also easy to see how an outside agency like Florida DOGE might view this as an effort to propagandize students into Marxism.
What’s the likely result?
Most obviously, the department might decide to avoid conflict with the government by eliminating the class altogether despite believing it was needed, therefore impoverishing students’ education.
Even if it did decide to require the class, the department is likely to pressure its instructor not to include things that look pro-Marxist, regardless of whether the professor thinks it would be the best material for the course. That poorly serves students and limits a professor’s ability to engage in the intellectual pursuit of teaching, to boot.
Finally, even if the department were to offer the class without compromising on content, its instructor will most certainly feel “in the crosshairs,” restricted from following his or her academic conscience lest he or she get the class eliminated through an incautious word.
Colleges should not be immune from investigations into waste and abuse. And there are viewpoint-based decisions that governors and legislatures have to make about colleges as part of the political and appropriations process. But the more granular those decisions, the more they threaten to substitute academic judgment with political judgment. It remains to be seen whether this is how Florida DOGE will actually operate, but the governor’s remarks create plenty of cause for concern.
Lest there be any doubt that governors of any party are capable of interfering in isolated academic decisions if given the opportunity, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (no friend of DeSantis) last Tuesday ordered the immediate removal of a CUNY-Hunter College job posting for a professor of Palestinian Studies. Hochul also ordered “a thorough review of the position to ensure that antisemitic theories are not promoted in the classroom.”
The job listing certainly listed plenty of controversial topics, calling for a “historically grounded scholar who takes a critical lens to issues pertaining to Palestine including but not limited to: settler colonialism, genocide, human rights, apartheid, migration, climate and infrastructure devastation, health, race, gender, and sexuality.” Yet the very next sentence stated, “We are open to diverse theoretical and methodological approaches.”
Critics are unlikely to believe that the job was really open to scholars with diverse approaches to whether, say, Israel is an “apartheid” state. Maybe it was, maybe not. But one can’t make that determination simply based on the language of the listing, and there is no reason to believe that the governor of New York is (or should be expected to be) the best-qualified person to make that call.
Faculty members are supposed to be hired because they are subject-matter experts who have the ability and knowledge in the field to make informed academic judgments. Readers may recall that Winston Churchill famously opined that democracy is “the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” That’s just as true when it comes to academic faculty making academic decisions — like it or not, there are no better alternatives. Even if one believes a particular group of public college faculty is, itself, making decisions that harm higher education, as DeSantis and Hochul both seem to believe, there’s one thing we can know for sure: transferring that job to politicians will only make it worse.
J. Ann Selzer planned to step back from election polling at the end of 2024. She had spent three decades working with The Des Moines Register and other media outlets, earning a reputation as “the best pollster in politics” for her consistent and reliable work. Selzer’s polls had correctly predicted the winner of every presidential race in Iowa since 2008, and she was hoping to end her election-related work with one last accurate survey of public opinion.
“Polling is a science of estimation, and science has a way of periodically humbling the scientist,” she said in a November 17 farewell column for The Register. “So, I’m humbled, yet always willing to learn from unexpected findings.”
Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer
President Donald Trump, however, doesn’t seem to think “humbled” is enough. That same day, Trump took to Truth Social to accuse Selzer of intentionally fabricating her poll and committing possible election fraud. A month later, he sued Selzer and The Register for alleged election interference and violations of the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act.
It’s difficult to imagine a more thorough and obvious violation of basic First Amendment principles than this lawsuit. Polling the electorate is election participation, not interference—and reporting your findings is protected speech whether your findings turn out to be right or wrong. Iowa’s laws on election “interference” are about conduct such as using a counterfeit ballot or changing someone else’s ballot. This does not and cannot include asking voters questions about their votes.
Any attempt to punish and chill reporting of unfavorable news or opinion is an affront to the First Amendment. Our rights as Americans, and participants in our democracy, depend on it.
Trump’s claims of consumer fraud have even less merit. Consumer fraud laws target sellers who make false statements or engage in deception to get you to buy something, like a sleazy car salesman rolling back the odometer on an old sedan. This cannot logically—or legally—apply to a newspaper pollster who makes a wrong prediction.
Consumer fraud statutes have no place in American politics or in regulating the news. But it has become an increasingly popular tactic to use such laws in misguided efforts to police political speech. For example, a progressive nonprofit tried to use a Washington state consumer protection law in an unsuccessful lawsuit against Fox News over its COVID-19 commentary. And attorneys general on the right used the same, “We’re just punishing falsehoods” theory to target progressive outlets. Both Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton opened investigations into the nonprofit Media Matters for America for allegedly manipulating X’s algorithm with “inauthentic behavior.” In the Texas suit, Paxton argues that he can use the state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act to punish speech even if it is “literally true,” so long as officials think it’s misleading.
Efforts to prohibit purportedly false statements in politics are as old as the republic. Indeed, our First Amendment tradition originated from colonial officials’ early attempts to use libel laws against the press.
America rejected this censorship after officials used the Sedition Act of 1798 to jail newspaper editors for publishing “false” and “malicious” criticisms of President John Adams. After Thomas Jefferson defeated Adams in the election of 1800, he pardoned and remitted the fines of those convicted, writing that he considered the act “to be a nullity, as absolute and as palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image.”
Trump’s allegations against Selzer are so baseless that you’d be forgiven for wondering why he even bothered. That is, until you realize that these claims are filed not because they have any merit or stand any chance of success, but in order to impose punishing litigation costs on his perceived opponents. The lawsuit is the punishment.
Lawsuits are costly, time-consuming, and often disastrous to people’s personal lives and reputations. If you have the threat of legal action hanging over you for what you’re about to say, you will think twice before saying it—and that’s the point.
In fact, Trump has a habit of doing this. He once sued an architecture columnist for calling a proposed Trump building “one of the silliest things anyone could inflict on New York or any other city.” The suit was dismissed. He also sued author Timothy L. O’Brien, business reporter at The New York Times and author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald,” for writing that Trump’s net worth was much lower than he had publicly claimed. The suit was also dismissed.
But winning those lawsuits wasn’t the point, and Trump himself said so. “I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more,” he said. “I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.” Back in 2015, he even threatened to sue John Kasich, then-governor of Ohio and a fellow Republican candidate for president, “just for fun” because of his attack ads.
This tactic is called a “strategic lawsuit against public participation,” or SLAPP for short, and it’s a tried-and-true way for wealthy and powerful people to punish their perceived enemies for their protected speech. It’s also a serious threat to open discourse and a violation of our First Amendment freedoms.
FIRE’s defense of pollster J. Ann Selzer against Donald Trump’s lawsuit is First Amendment 101
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A polling miss isn’t ‘consumer fraud’ or ‘election interference’ — it’s just a prediction and is protected by the First Amendment.
Lawsuits are costly, time-consuming, and often disastrous to people’s personal lives and reputations. If you have the threat of legal action hanging over you for what you’re about to say, you will think twice before saying it—and that’s the point. Trump’s dubious legal theory is a blatant abuse of the legal process, one that we cannot let stand. If we sued people every time we thought someone else was wrong about politics, nobody would speak about politics. A lawsuit requires a credible basis to believe your rights have been violated. You have to bring facts to court, not baseless allegations.
That is why my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), is defending Selzer pro bono against Trump’s SLAPP suit. By providing legal support free of charge, we’re helping to remove the financial incentive of SLAPP suits—just as we did when a wealthy Idaho landowner sued over criticism of his planned airstrip, when a Reddit moderator was sued for criticizing a self-proclaimed scientist, and when a Pennsylvania lawmaker sued a graduate student for “racketeering.”
The protection of unfettered freedom of expression is critical to our political process. Any attempt to punish and chill reporting of unfavorable news or opinion is an affront to the First Amendment. Our rights as Americans, and participants in our democracy, depend on it.
