DENVER — When President Donald Trump gave his joint address to Congress last week, he boasted that in his first few weeks back in the White House he had “brought free speech back to America.”
But First Amendment advocates say they’ve never seen freedom of speech under attack the way it has been in Trump’s second term.
Trump’s Republican administration has threatened Democratic members of Congress with investigation for criticizing conservatives, pulled federal grants that include language it opposes, sanctioned law firms that represent Trump’s political opponents and arrested the organizer of student protests that Trump criticized as “anti-Semitic, anti-American.”
“Your right to say something depends on what the administration thinks of it, which is no free speech at all,” said Will Creeley, legal director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonpartisan First Amendment group.
Trump on Monday took credit for the arrest by immigration agents of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student and legal permanent resident who helped lead pro-Palestinian protests there. Khalil’s lawyers say the government is targeting him for his activism and to “discriminate against particular viewpoints.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday that the administration will revoke the visas or green cards of supporters of Hamas, which the U.S. has designated a terrorist organization and denied that the policy threatened the First Amendment.
“This is not about free speech,” Rubio told reporters in Shannon, Ireland. “This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with. No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card.”
A federal judge earlier this week ordered immigration officials not to remove Khalil from the country while his case is sorted out.
“This is the first arrest of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it,” Trump wrote.
Targeting universities over language and demonstrations
Even some Trump allies were uncomfortable with that approach: “There’s almost no one I don’t want to deport,” wrote conservative commentator Ann Coulter on X, “but, unless they’ve committed a crime, isn’t this a violation of the first amendment?”
On the other end of the political spectrum, activists who organized to protest the war in Gaza were aghast at the administration’s move.
“We learn about our First Amendment rights since we’re children,” said Germán Rafael González, a member of Stanford University’s Students for Justice in Palestine. “But that is very much a myth. It’s not the reality we live in right now. And it’s scary.”
Prior to the arrest of Khalil over the weekend, the administration pressured Columbia University to crack down on anti-Israel activism among students and faculty, and Trump has threatened to go after any college that supports protests he deems “illegal.”
He also issued an order forbidding federal funding of what his administration labels diversity, equity and inclusion, which led to a freeze on federal grants as the administration reviews them for forbidden words such as “gender.”
Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, which sued the Trump administration over its DEI ban and won an injunction against it from a federal judge, said the administration is pulling funding from projects that have prohibited words, yanking grants from research into such areas as crop diversity or differences in infant mortality in urban and rural areas.
“Nobody really wants Big Brother telling you what you can research,” Wolfson said. “These are questions our country needs to know the answers to.”
‘The most serious of threats’ to free speech
Republicans for several years have been the party complaining about infringements on the First Amendment, from complaints about “woke” colleges canceling conservative speakers to bashing social media companies they accuse of censoring conservative viewpoints, including cutting Trump off after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol. GOP-controlled Florida and Texas even drew up laws to limit how social media firms regulate content, though the U.S. Supreme Court kept them on hold last year because of possible First Amendment violations.
Last year, Trump positioned himself as a champion of the First Amendment during his campaign, and he signed an executive order just hours after being sworn into office prohibiting anyone in the federal government from interfering with Americans’ free speech rights. But he also made pledges that signaled he might oppose some of the First Amendment’s fundamental protections, such as deporting foreign students who protested Israel or outlawing flag-burning, which the Supreme Court has ruled is protected free speech.
