By LEAH WILLINGHAM and MICHAEL CASEY, Associated Press

BOSTON (AP) — The Trump administration’s campaign of arresting and deporting college faculty and students who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations violates their First Amendment rights, lawyers for an association representing university professors argued in federal court.

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. U.S. District Judge William Young heard closing arguments Monday in Boston.

He did not say or indicate when or how he would rule. But he had some sharp words when talking about Trump.

“The president is a master of speech and he certainly brilliantly uses his right to free speech,” Young told federal lawyers. But whether Trump “recognizes whether other people have any right to free speech is questionable,” he added.

Plaintiffs are asking Young to rule that the policy violates the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act, a law governing how federal agencies develop and issue regulations.

No ideological deportation policy

Over the course of the trial, plaintiffs argued that the crackdown has silenced scholars and targeted more than 5,000 pro-Palestinian protesters.

“The goal is to chill speech. The goal is to silence students and scholars who wish to express pro-Palestinian views,” said Alexandra Conlan, a lawyer for the plaintiffs.

But federal lawyers and a top State Department official testifying for the government insisted there was no ideological deportation policy as the plaintiffs contend.

John Armstrong, the senior bureau official in Bureau of Consular Affairs, testified that visa revocations were based on longstanding immigration law. Armstrong acknowledged he played a role in the visa revocation of several high-profile activists, including Rumeysa Ozturk and Mahmoud Khalil, and was shown memos endorsing their removal.

Armstrong also insisted that visa revocations were not based on protected speech and rejected accusations that there was a policy of targeting someone for their ideology.

“It’s silly to suggest there is a policy,” he said.

People show their support for a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s policy of targeting students for deportation who took part in pro-Palestinian demonstrations on Monday, July 7, 2025, at the federal courthouse in Boston. (AP Photo/Michael Casey)

Were student protesters targeted?

U.S. lawyer William Kanellis said that out of about 5,000 pro-Palestinian protesters investigated by the federal government, only 18 were arrested. He said not only is targeting such protesters not a policy of the U.S. government, he said, it’s “not even a statistical anomaly.”

Out of the 5,000 names reviewed, investigators wrote reports on about 200 who had potentially violated U.S. law, Peter Hatch of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations Unit testified. Until this year, Hatch said, he could not recall a student protester being referred for a visa revocation.

Among the report subjects was Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate 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 the Tufts University student Ozturk, who was released in May from six weeks in detention after being arrested on a suburban Boston street. She said she was illegally detained following an op-ed she co-wrote last year criticizing her school’s response to the war in Gaza.

Hatch said most leads were dropped when investigators could not find ties to protests and the investigations were not inspired by a new policy but rather by existing procedures in place at least since he took the job in 2019.

Patrick Cunningham, an assistant special Agent in charge with Homeland Security investigations in Boston and who was involved in Ozturk’s arrest, said he was only told the Tuft University student was being arrested because her visa was revoked.

But he also acknowledged being provided a memo from the State Department about Ozturk as well as a copy of an op-ed she co-wrote last year criticizing her university’s response to Israel and the war in Gaza. He also admitted that he has focused more on immigration cases since Trump’s inauguration, compared to the drugs smuggling and money laundering cases he handled in the past.

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Professors spoke of scaling back activism

During the trial, several green card-holding professors described scaling back activism, public criticism and international travel following Khalil’s and Ozturk’s arrests.

Nadje Al-Ali, a green card holder from Germany and professor at Brown University, said 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 participate in anti-Trump protests and abandoned plans to write an article that was to be a feminist critique of Hamas.

“I felt it was too risky,” Al-Ali said.

Kanellis, a U.S. government attorney, said “feelings” and “anxiety” about possible deportation do not equate to imminent harm from a legal standpoint, which he argued plaintiffs failed to establish in their arguments.

By MIKE SCHNEIDER

Florida’s top emergency official asked a federal judge on Monday to resist a request by environmentalists to halt an immigration detention center known as “Alligator Alcatraz” in the middle of the Florida Everglades because their lawsuit was filed in the wrong jurisdiction.

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Even though the property is owned by Miami-Dade County, Florida’s southern district is the wrong venue for the lawsuit since the detention center is located in neighboring Collier County, which is in the state’s middle district. Decisions about the facility also were made in Tallahassee and Washington, Kevin Guthrie, executive director for the Florida Division of Emergency Management, said in a court filing.

“And all the detention facilities, all the buildings, and all the paving at issue are sited in Collier County, not Miami-Dade,” Guthrie said.

Paul Schwiep, an attorney for the environmental groups, responded during a virtual court hearing on Monday that the southern district was the proper venue since “a substantial portion of the events” took place in Miami-Dade County.

Environmental groups filed the lawsuit against federal and state officials in Florida’s southern district last month, asking for the project being built on an airstrip in the heart of the Florida Everglades to be halted because the process didn’t follow state and federal environmental laws.

U.S. District Kathleen Williams scheduled a June 30 hearing to consider whether the lawsuit was filed in the correct court. She also said during Monday’s hearing that she was going to hold off ruling on the environmental groups’ request for a temporary restraining order and temporary injunction stopping the project until an Aug. 6 hearing in Miami.

The lawsuit was filed before the facility was opened to detainees, and Schwiep estimated during Monday’s hearing that 900 people have been sent to “Alligator Alcatraz” in the past three weeks. Given that pace, Schwiep said the environmental groups’ goal wanted to halt further construction and the movement of additional people to the facility.

Critics have condemned the facility as a cruel and inhumane threat to the ecologically sensitive wetlands, while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republican state officials have defended it as part of the state’s aggressive push to support President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has praised Florida for coming forward with the idea, as the department looks to significantly expand its immigration detention capacity.

Follow Mike Schneider on the social platform Bluesky: @mikeysid.bsky.social.

U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee leaders are pushing lawmakers for tweaks to legislation that would regulate college sports by adding guarantees that schools will spend the same percentage on Olympic programs in the future as they do now.

USOPC CEO Sarah Hirshland told The Associated Press on Monday that a letter she and chair Gene Sykes sent to members of Congress last week was intended to restart a conversation about the SCORE Act, which currently calls for schools to sponsor at least 16 teams.

That’s a number that conforms with current NCAA rules for Power Four schools, and one that Hirshland worries would give schools no incentive to fund non-revenue sports that power the Olympic pipeline.

“You look and you say, ‘Is that effectively going to thwart the issue of allocating too many resources to football and not enough to other things?’ And my assessment is, no, it’s not going to do that,” Hirshland said.

The USOPC says all but three of the 67 Power Four schools sponsor more than 16 sports and the average school in that group has more than 21.

At last year’s Paris Olympics, 75% of U.S. Olympians and 53% of Paralympians had a connection with U.S. college sports.

The SCORE Act recently passed a House subcommittee and is set for markup this week, a process in which lawmakers amend certain facets of the bill. Hirshland said USOPC leadership has long been in discussions about adding provisions that would compel schools to spend at least the same percentage on Olympic sports as they do now.

“The bill, as it’s written, would make it too easy for a school to starve 15 programs and invest in one,” Hirshland said. “It’s important schools have the latitude to make decisions that are most effective for the school, but while also creating an environment that says ‘You don’t just need to be a football school.’ ”

She said she was encouraged that lawmakers were including provisions for protecting Olympic sports in a bill that would regulate the shifting college landscape.

The SCORE Act proposes to provide limited antitrust protection for the NCAA and would place the college sports’ name, image, likeness (NIL) system under one federal law instead of a mishmash of state regulations.

Starting this month, schools are allowed to pay up to $20.5 million to athletes in NIL deals. Most of that money will be funneled to football and basketball players, whose sports generate the bulk of college athletics revenue. It has left many to wonder about the future of the Olympic programs.

The act also includes a section that purports to protect Olympic sports with the 16-team minimum, but as stated in their letter to House leaders, Sykes and Hirshland are skeptical of that.

“The USOPC is committed to being a partner in this process and would welcome the opportunity to share further insights, data, and recommendations,” they wrote.

It also mandates that athletes not be turned into employees of their schools, a sticking point for some Democrats that figures to keep the bill from moving along in the Senate, where it would need 60 votes to pass.

Hirshland said the USOPC hasn’t taken a “strong position” on the employment issue, and is mostly concerned that any legislation includes strong protection for Olympic sports.

She says the USOPC-backed idea of keeping spending at certain percentages isn’t the only answer to the issue, but might be the simplest and best.

“We don’t want schools to starve Olympic sports by cutting them or starving them,” she said. “We want them to continue to provide investment in the growth of these sports.”

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By BILL BARROW, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration has released records of the FBI’s surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr., despite opposition from the slain Nobel laureate’s family and the civil rights group that he led until his 1968 assassination.

The release involves more than 240,000 pages of records that had been under a court-imposed seal since 1977, when the FBI first gathered the records and turned them over to the National Archives and Records Administration.

King’s family, including his two living children, Martin III and Bernice, were given advance notice of the release and had their own teams reviewing the records ahead of the public disclosure.

In a lengthy statement released Monday, the two living King children called their father’s case a “captivating public curiosity for decades.” But the pair emphasized the personal nature of the matter and urged that “these files must be viewed within their full historical context.”

“As the children of Dr. King and Mrs. Coretta Scott King, his tragic death has been an intensely personal grief — a devastating loss for his wife, children, and the granddaughter he never met — an absence our family has endured for over 57 years,” they wrote. “We ask those who engage with the release of these files to do so with empathy, restraint, and respect for our family’s continuing grief.”

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Bernice King was five years old when her father was killed. Martin III was 10.

President Donald Trump promised as a candidate to release files related to President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination. When Trump took office in January, he signed an executive order to declassify the JFK records, along with those associated with Robert F. Kennedy’s and King’s 1968 assassinations.

The government unsealed the JFK records in March and disclosed some RFK files in April.

Besides fulfilling the intent of his January executive order, the latest release serves as another alternative headline for Trump as he tries to mollify supporters angry over his administration’s handling of records concerning the sex trafficking investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, who killed himself behind bars while awaiting trial in 2019, during Trump’s first presidency. Trump last Friday ordered the Justice Department to release grand jury testimony but stopped short of unsealing the entire case file.

The King records, meanwhile, were initially intended to be sealed until 2027, until Justice Department attorneys asked a federal judge to lift the sealing order ahead of its expiration date.

Scholars, history buffs and journalists have been preparing to study the documents to find new information about his assassination on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which King co-founded in 1957 as the Civil Rights Movement blossomed, opposed the release. They, along with King’s family, argued that the FBI illegally surveilled King and other civil rights figures, tapping their offices and phone lines with the aim of discrediting them and their movement.

It has long been established that then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was intensely interested if not obsessed with King and others that he considered radicals. FBI records released previously show how Hoover’s bureau wiretapped King’s telephone lines, bugged his hotel rooms and used informants to get information against him.

“He was relentlessly targeted by an invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing disinformation and surveillance campaign orchestrated by J. Edgar Hoover through the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),” the King children said in their statement.

“The intent of the government’s COINTELPRO campaign was not only to monitor, but to discredit, dismantle and destroy Dr. King’s reputation and the broader American Civil Rights Movement,” they continued. “These actions were not only invasions of privacy, but intentional assaults on the truth — undermining the dignity and freedoms of private citizens who fought for justice, designed to neutralize those who dared to challenge the status quo.”

Opposition to King intensified even after the Civil Rights Movement compelled Congress and President Lyndon B. Johnson to enact the Civil Right Act of 1964 and the Voting Right Act of 1965. After those landmark victories, King turned much of his attention to economic justice and international peace. He was an outspoken critic of rapacious capitalism and the Vietnam War. King argued that political rights alone were not enough in an uneven economy. Many establishment figures like Hoover viewed King as a communist threat.

King was assassinated as he was aiding striking sanitation workers in Memphis, part of his explicit turn toward economic justice.

James Earl Ray plead guilty to assassinating King. He later renounced that plea and maintained his innocence until his death in 1998.

Members of King’s family, and others, have questioned whether Ray acted alone, or if he was even involved. King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, asked for the probe to be reopened, and in 1998, then-Attorney General Janet Reno directed the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department to take a new look. The Justice Department said it “found nothing to disturb the 1969 judicial determination that James Earl Ray murdered Dr. King.”