Free Speech Under Siege: The Legal Erosion of Rights Under Project 2025 | Sumayyah Ali

Since Trump’s decisive victory in November, and even whilst on the campaign trail, he promised to launch the “largest deportation program in American history.” as part of Project 2025, which is essentially a ‘wish list of right-wing policies, reflecting an extreme Christian nationalist ideology’. He even went as far as to claim that he would use the US military to action this on Twitter before he was elected, and whilst swathes of voters seemed to agree with these policies at the time, a significant number have returned to the Internet, heads bowed in shame, to express regret over the repercussions of their vote and the real threat which it poses to them.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed that at least three hundred visas have been revoked in recent months, with 6000 being the confirmed number (according to the August article by PBS ), and a concerningly substantial number of international students being specifically targeted (see the cases of Rumeysa Ozturk, Mahmoud Khalil, Yunseo Chung, Badar Khan Suri, Mohsen Madawi, Rasha Alawieh and Momodou Taal to name a few.) Some immigrants are being targeted for disappearance because they oppose Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, a fact that it is now physically dangerous, instead of merely unpopular, to believe. Although immigrants are protected under the US constitution and are theoretically more than free to exercise their right to free speech, this has recently been far from the case. True public outcry over recent deportations was only sparked after a French research minister was denied entry to the US for messages on his phone, in which he was critical of the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s huge cuts to the scientific research budget, a position which he also took on multiple social media posts prior to this. Academics around the world have been vocal about their hesitance about travelling to the United States, fearing possible repercussions based on race, disability or gender.

Similarly, the eye-opening case of Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian who was deported after attempting to enter the US through San Diego, is also extremely concerning. (Mooney details her appalling experience here, and this is definitely worth a read to provide a deeper understanding of the way ICE works.) Most alarmingly, in Mooney’s case, it was only after media coverage and external pressure to release her, that ICE claimed that she hadn’t informed them of the fact that she would be willing to pay for her own flight home. They then stated that this was all a miscommunication, and that they had been more than willing to let her leave, despite her stating this continuously since she her detainment. To put things into perspective: she had a Canadian passport, lawyers, resources, media attention, friends, family and even politicians advocating for her. Yet, she was still detained for nearly two weeks.

Imagine what this system is like for every other person in there.

White House spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, has also confirmed that Trump and the administration are looking into ways to legally deport even US citizens. This, of course, is not shocking of an administration which attempted to remove the constitutionally enshrined right to birthright citizenship. “The president has said, if it’s legal, if there is a legal pathway to do that, he’s not sure.” But so much of what the Trump administration has actioned is already illegal.

It is illegal to cancel visas and green cards without due process, as the Trump administration has done and continues to do. It is illegal to target immigrants for their speech under the US Constitution, as the Trump administration has done to pro-Palestinian activists. It is illegal to deport people to a foreign prison where they have no recourse to enforce their rights and no path to pursue their freedom – it is illegal to do this, as the Trump administration has done, specifically to prevent its victims from seeking to enforce their own rights in American courts. In the case of Mahmoud Khalil, his attorneys did not immediately know where he was being detained. The same tracker showing Khalil in custody in Louisiana on Monday, then indicated on Sunday that he was at an immigration detention centre in New Jersey. This was without any notification being given to his legal counsel, and his wife being ignored as she pleaded with ICE officers for any information as they took him away. Furthermore,  it is illegal to ignore the binding orders of judges to cease this conduct to ensure that the deportations can continue, punishing innocent people, silencing protected speech, and scaring populations out of work, travel, political participation or any of the other daily dignities they are supposedly entitled to in America. Khalil was released after 100 days in custody, having missed the birth of his child, and lays out his gruelling experience here.

The common stance taken by the Trump administration against Palestinian activists is to accuse them of supporting terrorist organisations, or to argue that their actions have been anti-Semitic in a bid to garner public support for their deportation. This stance has been repeatedly debunked by multiple experts, and only leads to the promotion of more dangerous and harmful misinformation.

But the law, increasingly, is whatever the Trump administration decides it is. And there is no force that seems prepared to make them obey the law when their will does not incline them to do so.

The Supreme Court has been no help, and if anything has acted, so far, as all but an accomplice to Trump’s dismantling of the rule of law in his pursuit of anti-immigrant vengeance. Lower court judges have attempted to intervene on behalf of the disappeared immigrants, issuing orders commanding the Trump administration to stop deportations under a long-dormant 1798 wartime measure known as the Alien Enemies Act. But the Supreme Court has stepped in to pause these orders, allowing the Trump administration’s deportation agenda to continue. Six of these nine justices were appointed by Republican presidents, including three when Donald Trump was in the White House in his first term. The other three were picked by Democratic presidents. The current court has been called the ‘most conservative-leaning’ in modern US history.

The legal precedents being established in these immigration disappearance cases have no limiting principles: if visa holders, asylum seekers and legal, permanent residents can be snatched and deported with effectively no practicable recourse to due process protections, then there is no reason citizens cannot be. It is in the interest of every American, and international, citizen to take an active stand in defence of immigrants. Because once the Trump administration decides that they have no rights, then neither do we.