Bound by a common enemy of free speech. (via Getty Images & law.com)

Last fall, when we endorsed the Democratic ticket, we warned that Donald Trump sought to target the enemy within. To us, that plainly meant “Americans. Your friends, your neighbors, critics, journalists, indeed, your editor-in-chief.” Three months in, we have seen his will, if not always the power, to execute that prerogative and endanger the Constitutional rights all in this nation possess.

For this blog, the most chilling violations concern free speech. We see it in Trump’s attacks on law firms and the detention of noncitizens opposing the war in Gaza. These two must be read together. If the courts—and failing that, the people—do not halt this robbery of the right to speak, we are all at risk.

The law firms face risks, but they have resources to slow the administration. Yet, the move against the firms is a flex of state power to punish free expression generally and to scare lawyers off from defending Trump’s enemies. Meanwhile, students and permanent residents have been imprisoned—detained, in more sanitized parlance—for their pro-Palestinian views. Wherever one stands on Gaza, this is a direct threat to liberty.

This blog may not agree with these advocates entirely. Yet, none facing these unconstitutional proceedings—Mahmoud Khalil, Yunseo Chung, Rumeysa Ozturk, Dr. Badar Khan Suri, and Mohsen Mahdawi—have expressed extreme or violent rhetoric that pollutes some protests for Palestine. None have been found to have broken any laws. They are not violent agitators, but political prisoners—of the United States.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. (via wikipedia)

Conservatives have long wailed, disingenuously and mendaciously, about others limiting their speech. But that is exactly what Trump and his plastic, fully-posable attorneys leading his Justice Department are doing. Marco Rubio, America’s first invertebrate Secretary of State and one-time critic of authoritarianism, is a handmaiden to this degradation of fundamental rights.

The US’s history on free speech is imperfect. Indeed, the law the administration is using to deport pro-Palestinian students passed over President Harry Truman’s veto. It came amid anti-communist hysteria affected Jews in particular. Such episodes are national low points and attempts to repeat them blaspheme our civic religion. For nearly 80 years, courts have been ruling that the First Amendment protect noncitizens, too.

Why focus here? This blog prizes the First Amendment. We must. The Internet lets us publish, but those words—”Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”—are at this blog’s foundation.

This right is vulnerable. There are local actors who have threatened and retaliated against this blog and your editor-in-chief. Such petty tyrannies irk, but they have never inspired fear or chilled us.

In our endorsement last fall, this blog contemplated Trump ordering the shooting of peaceful protesters. What has actually happened is still extremely dangerous. Would this nation or Massachusetts or Springfield be better if those this blog criticize could ruin or imprison your editor-in-chief?

The four active law firm executive orders aim to exclude the firms from interacting with the federal government and punishes clients that employ the firms. This is retaliation. Trump targeted Perkins Coie for a former partner’s work defending the 2020 results. Jenner & Block represents plaintiffs challenging Trump’s transphobic policies. Robert Mueller worked at WilmerHale. Susman Godfrey dared to represent a company that sued Fox News.

That brings us to the most chilling targets, though: individuals. Only recently has Trump ordered investigations into individuals and political institutions like the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue. Trump’s grip would have to tighten considerably for them to experience more than the costs of enduring a harassing investigation.

Clearly, it is worse when the administration abuses the already Kafkaesque immigration system to punish individuals for their beliefs.

ICE HQ in Washington. Now expanding into Constitutional rights violations! (via wikipedia)

Though notionally immaterial, we must speak plainly about the Middle East. The Palestinian people have a right to a nation in the Levant. Israel exists and shall endure barring domestic turmoil. To demand otherwise is baleful nonsense.

On October 7, Hamas slaughtered so many Israelis that they executed the largest pogrom of Jews since the Holocaust—unwittingly helped by the incompetence of Israel’s current government. Yet, this perhaps once-justifiable war has veered into a moral black hole with many thousands of innocent Gazans dead. Majorities of Israelis would end the fighting now to return the hostages Hamas still holds.

Your editor-in-chief has criticized protesters before this year, both for their tactics and for moments of plain antisemitism. Yet, the doxing of protesters and students was a step too far. Then, in 2025—233 years after the First Amendment was ratified—the disappearances began.

ICE often takes detainees off the street suddenly and shuttles them around the country. Cell phone cameras revealed this long ago. Perhaps now that ICE is disappearing dissenters, Americans will demand a stop to its other, legal cruelties. In a Washington Post op-ed, Khalil contemplated the failure of America’s humanity while detaining noncitizens alongside his broader alarm about everyone’s rights.

After Rubio (ab)used his power to purge legal residents he deemed offensive to US foreign policy, Immigration & Customs Enforcement did not treat them like typical detainees. ICE hatched plots—and backup plots—to keep them from family and lawyers and subject them to unfavorable forums.

The government’s approach to Khalil, Ozturk, Khan Suri, Mahdawi and Chung—who escaped imprisonment via injunction—is unconstitutional. Their incarcerations are happening only to punish.

Can US foreign policy survive another student op-ed? (via Tufts Daily)

Khalil missed the birth of his and his US citizen wife’s first child this week. Ozturk received substandard health care for her asthma and her jailers have inhibited the practice of her faith. Khan Suri’s absence has burdened his family, especially his children. Mahdawi just signed an oath to the US Constitution when ICE barged into his citizenship interview to arrest him.

Mahdawi and his allies planned ahead. A Vermont judge blocked his rendition to Louisiana. The others were batted around states until ICE could stuff them on planes and fly them to warehouses in Louisiana and Texas, where ICE concentrates detainees and where the courts are more byzantine.

We would deem this treatment unconstitutional no matter what they said. Still, nobody has marshaled evidence to support the vague allegations of antisemitism Rubio has burped out. Their positions and actions have been largely mild and sedate.

Khalil negotiated with Columbia University’s leaders during the protests there. The evidence suggests he was never less than several degrees of Kevin Bacon from lawbreakers or actual antisemites. Ozturk co-wrote an op-ed in Tufts’s student paper. Khan Suri, a Georgetown fellow, tweeted. Khalil and Mahdawi, both born in refugee camps, also brought personal testimony of the indignities Palestinians face.

Mahdawi was also active at Columbia, but he explicitly disclaimed antisemitism during the protests. He sought dialogue with Israelis on campus. He stepped back when the protests became more radical and erstwhile allies panned his efforts to find common ground.

Does Rubio think he can achieve nirvana from his samsara of being a putz by depriving Mahdawi of US citizenship? (via tricycle.org)

These individuals are threats to US foreign policy? A limp member like Rubio has the gall to label Mahdawi a threat to peace in the Middle East. A Palestinian Buddhist who reached out to Israeli students? The State Department is reportedly trying to ferret out anti-Christian bias. It should start with its own rejection of Matthew 5:9.

If this has happened to these individuals, it can happen to any of us. A renegade federal government has many tools beyond arrests, although that possibility is no longer unfathomable either.

Consider Perkins Coie. The federal opprobrium can be directed at individuals just as easily as it has been at the law firms—and it has.

Many of the targeted firms should have the resources to protect themselves. They are suing and, thus far, winning. However, legal costs could easily ruin the less fortunate. One misstep in an investigation could bring imprisonment—and that assumes the judicial system holds up.

This blog values our right to speak. We will not be silent—ever. But never before have we contemplated the risk of that commitment.

In our name—in all Americans’ name—right now, individuals are kept from family, their studies, and their freedom because they exercised one of this country’s most foundational rights. No American should tolerate this.

The victims are not just the speakers. After she gave birth to their son, Khalil’s wife, Noor Abdalla, underscored the intentional refusal—it took 33 minutes—to furlough Khalil, keeping him half a continent away.

“This was a purposeful decision by ICE to make me, Mahmoud, and our son suffer,” she said.

The ACLU put it in more universal terms.

“No one should be robbed of life’s most precious moments because they spoke out on what they believe in,” it posted.

No one should be robbed of life’s most precious moments because they spoke out on what they believe in.

— ACLU (@aclu.org) 2025-04-22T14:09:21.838Z

Mahdawi remains in Vermont, though detained in a state prison ICE contracts with. Speaking to Senator Peter Welch in a video, he reaffirmed his belief in this country.

“I’m staying positive by reassuring myself in the ability of justice and the deep belief of democracy,” Mahdawi said during the meeting. “This is the reason I wanted to become a citizen of this country, because I believe in the principles of this country.”

The younger Khalil was born an American. The son of a twice-over refugee, he enters this world with all the privileges US citizenship assures and all the rights that belong to free persons in the US.

Deliverance from this American Midnight rests on the promise of this next generation born with these rights and faith, like Mahdawi’s, in America’s principles—and the better angels of its nature.