President Donald Trump is engaged in an all-out assault on speech rights aimed at forcing every sector of society to adopt his administration’s viewpoint or risk discrimination, punishment, and, in some cases, jail, revocation of rights and deportation.
This is the most concerted assault on free speech rights since “the McCarthy Era,” said David Cole, the former legal director of the ACLU and a law professor at Georgetown University Law Center.
“Here, too, you have a government targeting for retribution and for punishment [to] those with whom it disagrees ― and doing so across the board,” Cole said.
These attacks have largely come through a series of executive orders aimed at eliminating from American life Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; transgender people; support for undocumented immigrants; opposition to Israeli government policies; and, of course, anyone Trump perceives as his enemy. Still others have seen their speech rights assailed by the Trump administration for refusing to abide by an executive order purporting to rename the Gulf of Mexico. Numerous lawsuits have been filed to challenge nearly every one of these orders.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
How far the administration is willing to go to assail the First Amendment became clear on Saturday evening when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested, detained and moved to deport Mahmoud Khalil without a warrant for his involvement in the anti-Gaza War protest movement on Columbia University’s campus in 2024. Khalil is a Palestinian citizen and U.S. green card holder, which confers legal rights that foreign visa holders lack.
President Donald Trump’s executive orders seek to require nonprofits, universities, corporations, law firms, student loan holders and artists to adopt his administration’s viewpoints or risk punishment and retaliation. ROBERTO SCHMIDT via Getty Images
The Department of Homeland Security, however, labeled him a supporter of terrorism for “activities aligned to Hamas” and now claims to have revoked his green card. A federal judge ordered the administration on Monday that it cannot deport Khalil until courts rule on his case, but the move to deport Khalil is just the beginning of an effort to root out “anti-American activity,” as Trump noted on social media site Monday.
Khalil’s arrest is a “dramatic escalation” in the Trump administration’s campaign to stamp out pro-Palestinian protests by seeking the deportation of student and faculty visa holders who participate or support them, according to Ramya Krishnan, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.
“This is part of a broader pattern by this administration to target and retaliate against its political opponents based on speech and criticism they disagree with,” Krishnan said.
Trump’s executive orders and actions take aim at decades of First Amendment precedents while attempting to silence the speech of his political opponents. Organizations are cowed by threats to cut off their funding if they speak or associate in terms deemed unfavorable by the administration. Students and university faculty on visas fear speaking or publishing on issues that are disfavored by the administration. A great chill is passing over the country.
Nonprofit groups, universities and corporations have moved quickly to scuttle policies and eliminate wrong-thought from their websites and public facing materials amid threats to revoke federal funding and scare off clients.
Many organizations and universities have already begun ending DEI programs or eliminating language related to DEI policies to seemingly comply with Trump’s anti-DEI executive order. Others now either hide those policies or language supporting racial minorities, women, disabled and LGBTQ people by using different phrases on their public materials.
These are “profiles in self-censorship,” Cole says, as neither the law nor the executive order require these organizations to either end or suppress mention of these programs. Trump’s DEI order bans “illegal” DEI programs, which would require an offending DEI program to violate federal anti-discrimination law.
“No DEI program has ever been found to violate federal anti-discrimination law,” Cole said.
This overcompliance comes as the administration is already using other executive orders to punish universities by revoking federal funding.
Under Trump’s anti-semitism order, the administration purported to strip $400 million in grants to Columbia University for its alleged failure to combat anti-semitism on campus by allowing pro-Palestine protests in 2024. The Department of Education is now targeting 60 additional universities for similar investigation and possible action.
“We’ve seen all too many corporations suck up to the president and not stand for their rights,” Cole said. “Universities are running scared because they are so dependent on federal funding and much of that funding is discretionary, and they’re concerned if they speak out Trump will take their funding. And so, you’re seeing very little vocal opposition to what happened to Columbia even though it was blatantly illegal.”
While the DEI order purports to ban “illegal” DEI, Trump’s order banning “gender ideology” goes further by seeking to “erase the existence of trans people,” said John Peller, President and CEO of the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, which is party to a lawsuit against both the DEI and anti-trans executive orders.
Protestors rally in support of Mahmoud Khalil in New York City after his arrest by immigration officials for participating in pro-Palestinian protests in 2024. CHARLY TRIBALLEAU via Getty Images
The anti-trans executive order purports to define only two genders ― male and female ― while officially refusing to acknowledge the existence of transgender people. And it forbids any federal money to go to organizations that “promote gender ideology.” It does not define the word “promote” or the term “gender ideology.”
“We don’t know what’s allowed and we don’t know what’s forbidden,” Peller said.
The threat of funding loss puts Peller’s organization, which receives millions in federal funding through the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program and other programs, “on a knife’s edge.” The orders potentially threaten their ability to recognize and tailor their services to trans people with HIV/AIDS, and to tailor outreach and care to Black and Latino populations to address particular issues that they face.
“We’re really in an incredibly tenuous situation, and we have over a 1,000 people living with HIV who are in housing programs that we fund,” Peller said. “We provide services to over 8,000 people per year through the Ryan White program who are living with HIV. The impact on those folks losing services potentially overnight really could be devastating.”
The lawsuit brought by the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, alongside the National Urban League and the National Fair Housing Coalition, alleges the executive orders are both unconstitutionally vague and, particularly for the anti-trans order, constitute viewpoint discrimination by requiring organizations to adopt the government’s opinions.
“Folks are going to overcompensate and change their behavior,” said Jose Abrigo, a lawyer on the case from Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund.
That is exactly what is happening as a number of nonprofits, including the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network; Boys & Girls Club of America; and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, deleted all mention of either LGBTQ or trans people from their websites.
The changes to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s website occurred after the Department of Justice threatened the organization with a loss of funds unless they complied, journalist Marisa Kabas reported. Other nonprofits addressing domestic abuse are similarly cowed, editing their sites to disappear language related to DEI and trans people, according to The 19th.
The National Endowment for the Arts has also moved to restrict grants to artists who affirm the existence of transgender and nonbinary people. Cole represents four theater and arts organizations who have filed suit challenging NEA’s actions as a violation of their First Amendment rights.
“This is plainly unconstitutional. You cannot use federal funding as a lever to try to control what a recipient of federal funds says outside of a federal program,” Cole said.
The Associated Press is suing the Trump administration for excluding its reporters from briefings and events for the organization’s refusal to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico. Alex Wong via Getty Images
Some of Trump’s actions go far beyond threats and chilling speech to exact punishment for opposing the president. Two executive orders targeted law firms with punitive actions aimed at destroying their business for representing clients that Trump deems his “enemies.”
Trump stripped lawyers for Covington & Burling who did pro bono work for special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump of their security clearances and banned the federal government from hiring the law firm. An action against Perkins Coie, which represented the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and won numerous lawsuits brought by Trump challenging the validity of the 2020 election, went much further by banning the law firm’s 1,200 lawyers from accessing federal buildings without government approval, obtaining government clients and requiring anyone who has hired the firm to disclose it to the government.
This punitive action “is an affront to the Constitution and our adversarial system of justice” that violates the First Amendment and other constitutional provisions, a lawsuit filed by Perkins Coie on Tuesday says. A district court judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking key sections of the executive order on Wednesday.
The White House also took punitive action against the press by denying access to Associated Press reporters because the organization refuses to identify the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, and seizing control of the White House Correspondents Association to remove disfavored journalists. This included kicking HuffPost out of the press pool to cover the president. The Associated Press has sued the White House for violating its First Amendment rights.
Trump is even trying to unilaterally gut the law that forgives student loans to graduates who go on to perform public service at nonprofits or other organizations by denying forgiveness to anyone who works in a field that promotes DEI, pro-Palestine positions, immigrant rights or acknowledges transgender people.
All of these orders and the actions taken from chilling speech to trying to destroy Perkins Coie to jailing and threatening Khalil with the revocation of his rights and deportation “all part of the same story,” Krishnan said.
By targeting nonprofits, universities, law firms, professional associations, the press and protests, they show a “clear pattern of seeking to neutralize civil society,” according to Cole.
“These groups play a critical role in checking government abuse and standing up for our principles,” Cole said. “He is seeking to neutralize them, as have authoritarians in almost any other country where they’ve come to power through elections, because that’s where opposition comes from.”
