Judge Rules Trump Administration Unconstitutionally Targeted Pro-Palestinian Students for Deportation

Since Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil was arrested in March 2025 over his pro-Palestinian campus activism, the Trump administration's push to deport noncitizen students critical of Israel's war in Gaza has drawn lawsuits from multiple directions. On Friday, August 28, 2026, it drew a major defeat.

U.S. District Judge Noël Wise, sitting in San Jose, California, ruled that two provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act that the administration relied on to cancel student visas and start deportation proceedings are unconstitutional as applied, according to The New York Times and India Today. Wise, a Biden appointee, issued a 90-page decision finding the State Department and Department of Homeland Security had used the statutes to punish noncitizens for expressing views the government didn't like.

"That strength is diminished when members of our society, citizens and noncitizens alike, must self-censor and 'behave' or suffer the government's retaliation," Wise wrote, according to India Today.

The case traces back to Khalil's arrest, which spurred a lawsuit filed in August 2025 by The Stanford Daily, Stanford University's student newspaper, on behalf of itself and noncitizen student journalists. Their lawyers argued the administration's tactics created a chilling effect so severe that visa-holding writers stopped covering campus Middle East protests out of fear of being deported, per India Today and a report from the Bahrain-based Daily Tribune. Khalil's own deportation fight continues separately.

The State Department and DHS did not immediately respond to requests for comment, India Today reported.

A Separate Loss on the Other Side of the Same Fight

Earlier in August, a different federal judge dealt the administration a defeat on the opposite end of its campus antisemitism strategy. U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns in Boston, a Clinton appointee, dismissed a Justice Department lawsuit accusing Harvard University of failing to protect Jewish and Israeli students from harassment after Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, according to Breitbart and the Daily Signal.

The DOJ's Civil Rights Division, led by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, had filed that suit in March 2025, alleging Jewish and Israeli students were harassed, physically assaulted, stalked and spat upon. Stearns found the evidence didn't hold up. "Only three incidents are alleged to have occurred after this period, all of which took place nearly a full year later," he wrote, calling the pattern "too isolated and episodic to support a plausible inference that any institutionalized noncompliance with Title VI persists at Harvard to this day."

Dhillon said the department disagreed with the ruling and was determining how to proceed, adding that the Civil Rights Division has "an extensive and active portfolio of antisemitism enforcement, including indictments, prosecutions, settlements, and investigations across the country."

Two Judges, Two Rulings, Same Result

Both rulings came from judges appointed by Democratic presidents, and both went against the Trump administration, but for opposite reasons. Wise found the government went too far punishing speech. Stearns found the government hadn't proven its own antisemitism claims held up under Title VI's legal standard.

The underlying concerns on each side are real. DOJ's complaint pointed to Harvard's own Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, which had flagged the "exclusion of Israeli or Zionist students from social spaces and extracurricular activities." Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, said in May that "Harvard has continued to fail miserably on antisemitism," a sign the criticism isn't confined to one party. A Fox News opinion piece cited an open letter from 170 Harvard faculty members describing Jewish and Israeli students being told to leave classrooms or renounce Zionism.

On the other side, the Stanford Daily plaintiffs argued that using immigration statutes to strip visas from students who never faced criminal charges, based solely on political advocacy, is viewpoint discrimination the Constitution doesn't allow. Judge Wise's ruling adopted that view, finding the government's authority to police noncitizen speech is not unlimited.

Neither ruling resolves the other case. The Justice Department hasn't said whether it will appeal Stearns' Harvard dismissal, and it's unclear whether it will appeal Wise's ruling or continue relying on the same INA provisions against other students. Khalil's individual deportation case, which started this entire legal chain in March 2025, remains pending in a separate court.