Judge Accuses Trump, Rubio, and Noem of “Unconstitutional Conspiracy”

A Reagan-appointed federal judge says the Trump administration’s targeting of pro-Palestinian activists is an “unconstitutional conspiracy.”

U.S. District Judge William Young, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1985, criticized Trump’s draconian crackdown on people like Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, whose only crimes were being vocal supporters of Palestine, while announcing his plans to issue an order to prevent those kinds of targeted deportations from happening again.

“I find it breathtaking that I have been compelled on the evidence to find the conduct of such high-level officers of our government—Cabinet secretaries—conspired to infringe the First Amendment rights of people with such rights here in the United States,” Young said, alluding to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “These Cabinet secretaries have failed in their sworn duty to uphold the Constitution.”

Young even compared the administration’s larger deportation policy to people catching and returning enslaved African Americans under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

“I’ve asked myself why—how did this happen? How could our own government, the highest officials in our government, seek to infringe the rights of people lawfully here in the United States? And I’ve come to believe that there’s a concept of freedom here that I don’t understand,” he said at the same hearing. “The record in this case convinces me that these high officials, and I include the president of the United States, have a fearful view of freedom.”

Young plans on releasing a formal ruling sometime next week.

“We cast around the word ‘authoritarian,’” he said. “I don’t, in this context, treat that in a pejorative sense, and I use it carefully, but it’s fairly clear that this president believes, as an authoritarian, that when he speaks, everyone, everyone in Article II is going to toe the line absolutely.”