Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk have become national symbols for the Trump administration’s harsh crackdown on free speech on college campuses and on vulnerable people espousing ideas at odds with the administration’s worldview.
It is unclear what Khalil’s role was in the Columbia University protests beyond serving as a negotiator for pro-Palestinian students, or what Ozturk has done beyond co-authoring a 2024 op-ed in her school newspaper questioning Tufts University’s refusal to divest from companies with ties to Israel. Whatever the case, the government’s failure to provide Khalil, Ozturk, and other green card or student visa holders with the basic procedural safeguards of our legal system and the Trump administration’s disregard for free speech should give pause to every American who cherishes freedom and democracy.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials who arrested Khalil informed him that his student visa had been revoked. But Khalil was not at Columbia on a student visa; he is a green-card holder whose pregnant wife is an American citizen. ICE officials did not charge Khalil with any crime. They secretly transferred him to a detention facility in Louisiana. And they repeatedly denied him the opportunity to speak privately with his lawyers until a federal judge ordered the government let him to do so.
The six plainclothes ICE officials who arrested Ozturk while she was on her way to break her Ramadan fast did not initially display their badges. They did not file any charges against her. Ozturk, who the Department of Homeland Security claimed “engaged in activities in support of Hamas,” was taken to the same Louisiana detention facility as Khalil. Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned student visa holders not to create “a ruckus.”
The story is not over, though. Khalil and Ozturk’s best hope going forward is to rely on a Supreme Court decision won by radical New York lawyer Carol Weiss King. King hailed from a prominent family of New York lawyers; her brother founded the New York firm Paul Weiss. King took a different path from her family. A lawyer from the 1920s to early 1950s for the International Labor Defense, the legal arm of the Communist Party USA, King assisted in saving the Scottsboro “Boys,” nine young Black men wrongfully convicted of raping two white women in a railroad car, from the electric chair, and Angelo Herndon, an 18-year-old Black Communist convicted for attempting to incite insurrection under an old Georgia slave insurrection statute, from 18 to 20 years on a Georgia chain gang.
Crucially for the current moment, King specialized in defending radical immigrants from deportation. She had been outraged by the Palmer Raids and the Red Scare following World War I that resulted in mass deportations of radical immigrants. One of her highest-profile cases established an important Supreme Court precedent about the rights of noncitizens to due process and free speech. During the 1940s, King joined the legal team that prevented the U.S. government from deporting Harry Bridges, the Australian-born head of the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union. The U.S. government initially alleged that Bridges belonged to the Communist Party USA, but a hearing examiner found no proof that Bridges had officially joined the organization. Congress subsequently amended the statute to make affiliation with the Communist Party grounds for deportation. A second hearing examiner found that Bridges had joined organizations affiliated with the Communist Party, and the attorney general ordered the union leader’s deportation.
In a 1945 Supreme Court opinion known as Bridges v. Wixon, Justice William O. Douglas rejected that Bridges had been “affiliated” with the Communist Party, found that Bridges’ due process rights had been violated because the government had introduced unsworn testimony against him during his second hearing, and ruled that his detention had been “unlawful.”
Most importantly for Khalil, Ozturk, and other legal residents and student visa holders who may be facing deportation because of their political beliefs, the court in Bridges v. Wixon held that noncitizens enjoyed the same First Amendments rights as everyone else. “Freedom of speech and of press is accorded aliens residing in this country,” Douglas wrote. “So far as this record shows the literature published by Harry Bridges, the utterances made by him were entitled to that protection. They revealed a militant advocacy of the cause of trade unionism. But they did not teach or advocate or advise the subversive conduct condemned by the statute.”
Justice Frank Murphy went even further in his concurring opinion: “The record in this case will stand forever as a monument to man’s intolerance of man. Seldom if ever in the history of this nation has there been such a concentrated and relentless crusade to deport an individual because he dared to exercise the freedom that belongs to him as a human being and that is guaranteed to him by the Constitution.”
The court’s opinions in Bridges v. Wixon built on the ideas of Justice Louis Brandeis that free speech plays an essential role in American democracy as well as the ideas of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. that free speech means “freedom for the thought that we hate.”
It is incumbent upon the nine current justices to reaffirm Bridges v. Wixon establishing due process and free speech rights for noncitizens facing deportation and to embrace Brandeis’ and Holmes’ ideas about free speech. The Roberts Court—in gutting provisions of the Voting Rights Act, denying that the 14th Amendment protects abortion rights, and outlawing affirmative action—has often overruled or ignored precedent in high-profile cases. But the justices should think twice before erasing the legacy of Carol Weiss King and the other courageous lawyers who represented Harry Bridges and saved him from deportation.
Harry Bridges lived for the rest of his life in this country and died in 1990 in San Francisco at age 88. His memory lives on through the important Supreme Court precedent that bears his name.
The cases of Khali, Ozturk, and many others like them represent a fundamental challenge to our country. They are about whether the American people want a legal system that prioritizes basic procedural fairness and a democracy that tolerates unpopular ideas and protects the hard-won First Amendment rights established by Carol Weiss King in the case of Harry Bridges.
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