A federal judge has denied the first requests for pauses to two executive orders by the Trump administration in a free speech lawsuit filed by a Cornell professor and two graduate students.
The ruling comes nearly a week after one of the plaintiffs, Momodou Taal, a British and Gambian doctoral student and pro-Palestinian activist, was informed that his student visa had been revoked.
In her decision Thursday, U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Coombe said Taal’s lawyers have not shown that the case is within the jurisdiction of her court.
The lawsuit, filed by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, calls for an injunction on two executive orders they argue “authorize deportation or prosecution based on protected speech.”
The lawsuit says language in those orders violate Taal and other plaintiffs’ rights to freedom of speech and due process, by barring noncitizens from “criticizing the U.S. government, its institutions, American culture, or the government of Israel.”
After the decision, Taal’s lawyers filed additional requests for temporary restraining orders that would prevent the government from deporting Taal.
His lawyers argue that without the restraining order he will “suffer immediate and irreparable harm because he is at imminent risk of detention and deportation, may be spirited away from the Court’s jurisdiction or out of the country altogether, and is subject to restraints on his liberty to which the general public is not.”
As of Thursday afternoon, Taal had not been detained or deported.
In a statement Friday, Eric Lee, one of Taal's attorneys said "the legality of Mr. Taal's possible detention has not yet been decided by the court."