Judge declines to toss Stanford paper speech case

SAN JOSE, Calif. (CN) — A federal judge affirmed Friday a student newspaper and two of its unnamed international writers had the right to bring a case against the government concerning possible visa revocations and other actions due to the students’ reporting on or expressing support for Palestine.

U.S. District Judge Noël Wise’s order denied a motion to dismiss, saying that The Stanford Daily adequately showed its noncitizen members had legitimate fears that the Department of Homeland Security violated their First Amendment rights by chilling protected speech and threatening immigration consequences.

Wise said those fears stem from the Trump administration’s hardline stance on noncitizen speech, including threats to enforce the Revocation and Deportation Provision, which allows visa revocation and removal proceedings if international students “participate in pro-Palestinian protests or express pro-Palestine/anti-Israel views.”

At a Jan. 6 hearing, Conor Fitzpatrick, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression representing the paper and two unnamed plaintiffs, said the threats had a chilling effect on The Stanford Daily.

In her order, Wise, a Joe Biden appointee, agreed with the plaintiffs.

“The Court finds that Stanford Daily has sufficiently alleged that its mission has been frustrated by the Government’s threats of immigration enforcement, which has chilled student speech,” she said.

“The chilling effects have caused concrete and demonstrable injury to Stanford Daily’s activities, including decreased ‘quantity and diversity of opinion pieces’ in The Stanford Daily; ‘substantially reduced participation from noncitizen contributors’; fewer and less-diverse on-the-record sources for articles; and numerous requests from noncitizen members for articles to be published anonymously, not to be published at all, or for articles already published to be taken down,” she said.

Wise said the unnamed plaintiffs also reasonably fear the government could interpret their pro-Palestine expression “to be counter to the Government’s current stated policies.”

She cited similar high-profile cases raised by the plaintiffs, including Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student detained for three months after protesting for Palestinian rights, and Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University student who was detained and had her visa revoked after writing an op-ed criticizing the school’s response to the Israel-Hamas war.

“We’re pleased with the court’s ruling,” Fitzpatrick said in an email to Courthouse News. “Deporting lawfully present noncitizens because of their opinions violates the First Amendment and betrays America’s commitment to freedom of speech.”

Wise said The Stanford Daily was entitled to relief, including blocking Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem from revoking visas or initiating deportation over protected speech.

The plaintiffs cited statements by President Donald Trump and his allies, both before and after the November 2024 election, as grounds for an injunction.

In October 2023, Trump — then a presidential candidate — said he would revoke the visas of foreign students he described as radical, anti-American and antisemitic, comments he repeated on other occasions.

“On May 14, 2024, Mr. Trump said at a campaign event, ‘One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country,’” the plaintiffs said in their original complaint filed in August 2025. “’You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.’”

Attorneys representing Rubio and Noem did not immediately respond to a request for comment.