A recap of the trial over the Trump administration's crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus protesters

San Francisco Chronicle​

10-07-2025

BOSTON (AP) — Plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's campaign of arresting and deporting college faculty and students who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations spent the first few days of the trial showing how the crackdown silenced scholars and targeted more than 5,000 protesters.
The lawsuit, filed by several university associations, is one of the first against President Donald Trump and members of his administration to go to trial. Plaintiffs want U.S. District Judge William Young to rule that the policy violates the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act, a law that governs how federal agencies develop and issue regulations.
Investigating protesters
One of the key witnesses was Peter Hatch, who works for the Homeland Security Investigations unit within U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Over two days of testimony, Hatch told the court how a 'Tiger Team' was formed in March to investigate people who took part in the protests. Its formation followed two executive orders issued by Trump that addressed terrorism and combating antisemitism.
Hatch detailed how the team received as many as 5,000 names of protesters and wrote reports on about 200 who had potentially violated U.S. law. The reports, several of which were shown in court Thursday, included biographical information, criminal history, travel history, affiliations with pro-Palestinian groups as well as press clips and social media posts on their activism or allegations of their affiliation with Hamas or other anti-Israel groups.
Until this year, Hatch said, he could not recall a student protester being referred for a visa revocation.
'It was anything that may relate to national security or public safety issues, things like: Were any of the protesters violent or inciting violence? I think that's a clear, obvious one,' Hatch testified. 'Were any of them supporting terrorist organizations? Were any of them involved in obstruction or unlawful activity in the protests?'
Among the report subjects were Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, who was released last month after 104 days in federal immigration detention. Khalil has become a symbol of Trump's clampdown on the protests.
Another was Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was released in May from a Louisiana facility. She spent six weeks in detention after she was arrested while walking on the street of a Boston suburb. She says she was illegally detained following an op-ed she co-wrote last year criticizing the school's response to the war in Gaza.
Hatch also acknowledged that most of the names came from Canary Mission, a group that says it documents people who 'promote hatred of the U.S.A., Israel and Jews on North American college campuses.'
Hatch said the right-wing Jewish group Betar was another source.
'It's true many of the names, even most of the names, came from that website, but we were getting names and leads from many different sources,' he testified Wednesday. On Thursday he said he does not know who runs the website nor does he know anyone with the group.
Hatch conceded that his team was not instructed to focus solely on leads from Canary Mission.
Hatch said most of the leads were dropped when investigators could not find ties to protests and the investigations were not inspired by a new policy but rather a procedure in place at least since he took up the job in 2019.
What is Canary Mission?
Weeks before Khalil's arrest, a spokesman for Betar told The Associated Press that the activist topped a list of foreign students and faculty from nine universities that it submitted to officials, including then-incoming Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who made the decision to revoke Khalil's visa.
The Department of Homeland Security said at the time that it was not 'working with' Betar and refused to answer questions about how it was treating reports from outside groups.
In March, speculation grew that administration officials were using Canary Mission to identify and target student protesters. That's when immigration agents arrested Ozturk.
Canary Mission has denied working with administration officials, while noting the speculation that its reports led to that arrest and others.
While Canary Mission prides itself on outing anyone it labels as antisemitic, its leaders refuse to identify themselves, and its operations are secretive. News reports and tax filings have linked the site to a nonprofit based in the central Israeli city of Beit Shemesh. But journalists who have visited the group's address, listed in documents filed with Israeli authorities, have found a locked and seemingly empty building.
In recent years news organizations have reported that several wealthy Jewish Americans have made cash contributions to support Canary Mission, disclosed in tax paperwork filed by their personal foundations. But most of the group's funding remains opaque, funneled through a New York-based fund that acts as a conduit for Israeli causes.
Scholars scared by the crackdown
The trial opened with Megan Hyska, a green card holder from Canada who is a philosophy professor at Northwestern University. She detailed how efforts to deport Khalil and Ozturk prompted her to scale back her activism, which had included supporting student encampments and protesting in support of Palestinians.
'It became apparent to me, after I became aware of a couple of high-profile detentions of political activists, that my engaging in public political dissent would potentially endanger my immigration status,' Hyska said.
The second witness, Nadje Al-Ali, a green card holder from Germany and professor at Brown University, said that after the arrests of Khalil and Ozturk, she canceled a planned research trip and a fellowship to Iraq and Lebanon, fearing that 'stamps from those two countries would raise red flags' upon her return. She also declined to take part in anti-Trump protests and dropped plans to write an article that was to be a feminist critique of Hamas.
'I felt it was too risky,' Al-Ali said.