“ICE Goes Masked for One Reason”: Reagan Judge Torches Trump’s Crackdown as Klan-Like
This is the kind of headline the country needs.
Judge William Young, a federal judge from Massachusetts appointed by Ronald Reagan, just did what no one in Trump’s orbit seems capable of: he told the president no. Not politely. Not behind closed doors. In a federal ruling that reads like a civics lesson for a misbehaving child.
Judge Young: “[The president] ignores everything … The Constitution, our civil laws, regulations, mores, customs, practices, courtesies – all of it; the President simply ignores it all when he takes it into his head to act”.
The scheme was simple. “The government’s aim,” Young wrote, was “tamping down pro-Palestinian student protests and terrorizing similarly situated non-citizen (and other) pro-Palestinians into silence because their views were unwelcome.”
He called out the theatrics too: “ICE goes masked for a single reason — to terrorize Americans into quiescence.” He linked the practice to “cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan.”
Young rejected the core premise outright: noncitizens “have the same free speech rights as the rest of us.” The First Amendment “does not draw President Trump’s invidious distinction.”
This wasn’t a narrow slap on the wrist. It was a hard check on power. Newsrooms called it what it is: a landmark rebuke of a White House using deportation to silence dissent. Reuters and AP both note the court found the policy chilled campus speech and abused executive authority.
Even the op-ed pages got it right: Young’s opinion is a “stirring rebuke” of a “bullying and authoritarian” approach, and a civic lesson that free speech “protects … all people, regardless of citizenship.” That’s the headline the country needs. Facts, not spin: the court found an unlawful plan to punish speech.
A remedy hearing is next. But the map is drawn: courts can stop it, campuses can resist it, communities can protect it.
So act like it. Quote the ruling. Teach it. Share it. Use it to defend every kid with a sign and a voice. Because if they can deport for ideas today, they can jail for ideas tomorrow. This decision says no. Hold that line.
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