Trump cannot deport students for criticizing Israel, judge rules

the First Amendment doesn't come with an asterisk for people the government finds annoying. If you're a noncitizen student who marched around campus saying things about Gaza that made university administrators and federal officials uncomfortable, that's still speech. Unpopular, maybe even wrongheaded speech in a lot of cases, but speech.

Here's the thing conservatives ought to sit with. We spent years, rightly, howling about universities policing conservative students, punishing them for the wrong opinion, running them out of classrooms and jobs over a tweet. The logic doesn't change just because the speaker is a foreign student criticizing Israel instead of a kid wearing a MAGA hat. If the government can deport someone for saying something it doesn't like, it can eventually come for speech we do like too. That's not a hypothetical, that's just how these powers work once they exist.

None of this means campus disruptions, harassment, or actual intimidation should get a pass. Universities have every right to enforce rules of conduct, and if students broke actual laws, that's a different conversation entirely. But immigration status is not supposed to be a backdoor around the Constitution, and using deportation as a punishment for disfavored opinions sets a precedent that won't stay contained to one issue or one administration.

Conservatives built our whole argument on free speech and skepticism of government power on the idea that these rules apply evenly, not just when it's politically convenient. This ruling isn't a loss for the America First cause. If anything, it's a reminder of what that phrase is supposed to mean: a government that follows its own rulebook, even when it's inconvenient.