Why Trump’s attacks on free speech should alarm all Americans, not just his latest targets

By Mike Zamore

Mike Zamore is the national director of policy and government affairs at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). 

April 2, 2025 at 7:07 AM EDT

In Russia, Vladimir Putin will throw protestors against the war in Ukraine in prison. The Chinese Communist Party will send dissidents to reeducation camps. It makes you thankful we live in the U.S.A., where we proudly celebrate our right to free speech, including the right to tell the government to go to hell. Right?

Except on March 9, the Trump administration arrested and briefly disappeared Mahmoud Khalil because they disapprove of his protests against Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza. He was transferred to a remote, privately run Louisiana detention facility in the middle of the night and remains locked up. If you cut through the loose accusations, the White House justification for detaining and seeking to deport a green card holder, whose U.S. citizen wife is expecting their baby in a month, is that the administration disapproves of his views on Middle East politics.

And this case is no outlier. It was a canary in the coal mine of further attempted deportations. Rümeysa Öztürk, a PhD student at Tufts, was recently accosted and taken off the street by armed, masked, unnamed men. Her transgression was apparently co-authoring an op-ed in the student newspaper the previous year about the university’s handling of student protests.

Her attempted deportation is simply the latest example of the Trump administration taking a sledgehammer to free speech and using the federal government to enforce compliance with government-sanctioned views.

Lest we forget, the White House banned the Associated Press from the White House press pool in February for failing to use the president’s preferred language to describe the body of water south of Louisiana. And their colleagues at CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, and NPR—broadcasters that President Trump has attacked—have had the Federal Communications Commission announce investigations into them.

Source Links: https://fortune.com/2025/04/02/trump-admin-free-speech-first-amendment