Cato/FIRE Amicus Brief Against Speech-Based Deportations of Foreign Students
My colleagues at the Cato Institute have, together with FIRE and other groups, filed an amicus brief in the case of Ozturk v. Trump, explaining why speech-based deportations of foreign students violate the First Amendment. As the brief explains, Ozturk is a Tufts graduate student detained for an anti-Israel op ed in a campus paper that, however flawed, does not endorse Hamas terrorism, or indeed even mention it.
Thomas Berry of Cato and FIRE attorney Conor Fitzpatrick have a helpful summary of the brief:
Rumeysa Ozturk is a graduate student at Tufts University. Ozturk is a Turkish citizen who was living in the United States on a student visa. On March 25, Ozturk was approached and surrounded by six plainclothes officers, stripped of her cellphone and backpack, handcuffed, and taken into custody in an unmarked vehicle. Unbeknownst to her, the United States had revoked her visa just days earlier. Ozturk was transferred to Vermont and then Louisiana, where she remains in custody.
A provision of federal immigration law grants the secretary of state the authority to deport an alien if the secretary “has reasonable ground to believe” that the alien’s “presence or activities in the United States … would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” The government cited this provision in revoking Ozturk’s visa, without specifying why it believed her presence would have adverse foreign policy consequences.
Evidence indicates that Ozturk’s visa was revoked solely on the basis of an op-ed she co-authored for a student newspaper. That op-ed criticized the Tufts University administration for dismissing certain student government resolutions. The op-ed argued that these resolutions would have held “Israel accountable for clear violations of international law” in Palestine.
Ozturk has petitioned a federal court to order her released, and Cato has joined a broad coalition of groups, led by FIRE, to file an amicus brief supporting that petition. In our brief, we explain that noncitizens residing in the United States have the same First Amendment rights as citizens. The Supreme Court said as much in Bridges v. Wixon (1945), where the Court remarked that “freedom of speech and of press is accorded aliens residing in this country.” And the Supreme Court also affirmed this principle in Bridges
Article from Reason.com
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