Bulwark Takes - Taking Trump’s Speech Crackdown to Court (w/ Conor Fitzpatrick)

Episode Date: August 10, 2025

The Trump administration is trying to deport foreign students for doing nothing more than speaking their minds — attending protests, writing editorials, voicing opinions the government doesn’t like. It’s a direct attack on the First Amendment, and FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) is taking them to court. Sarah Longwell talks with FIRE attorney Conor Fitzpatrick about the lawsuit, the students targeted, and why this fight matters for everyone’s free speech—citizen or not.

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Hey, guys, Sarah Longwell here, publisher of the bulwark. And I'm joined today by Connor Fitzpatrick, attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression Fire, an organization that is literally fire. It does great work. It is a principled group that protects free speech. And Connor, I'm super excited to have you here. Thanks for being here, man. Thanks for having me. Okay.

Context for why we are talking. You guys filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, and Fire said on its website, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Trump administration have waged an unprecedented assault on free speech targeting foreign university students for deportation based on bedrock protected speech like writing out beds and peacefully attending protests. Their attack is casting a pall of fear over millions of non-citizens who worry that voicing the quote-unquote wrong opinion about America. or Israel will result in deportation. Okay, Connor, will you just give us a rundown of some of the notable crackdowns on non-citizen speech and how this lawsuit, which is Stanford Daily Publishing Corporation at all versus Rubio at all, how does it deal with that? So the two main ones that folks have probably seen in the news from earlier this year are

those of Mahmoud Khalil and Ramayya Ostirk. Mr. Khalil was a student at Columbia University. Ms. Ozturk was at Tufts University, pursuing a Ph.D., and both of them have been targeted for deportation by the Trump administration and Mr. Rubio for bedrock protected speech, Mr. Khalil for attending and organizing protests at Columbia University, and Ms. Ozturk for doing nothing more than co-authoring and editorial in her student newspaper. Now, to be clear, neither of them have been charged or convicted with a crime. They are being targeted solely for their protected speech, and that's where the First Amendment comes in. She was the young woman who was basically grabbed off the streets by ICE agents, and he was taken to a prison. And so, why don't you, starting with him, because he's been back in the news recently, because he's given a couple of interviews, and he says things that make people angry.

And frankly, he says some things that were I to be in an argument with him, I would tell him why I do not agree vociferously with some of the points that he is making. However, I guess the question is, like, how is it possible that our government can arrest people just for having opinions that they don't like? Well, it shouldn't be. And the First Amendment is there and designed to prevent that from happening. To be clear, the First Amendment is designed to protect unpopular speakers. Popular speakers don't need any protection from the government because people who agree with

them are already in power. But the core idea in America that we have always had is that we do not need the government to protect us from ideas. I think back to Thomas Jefferson's first inaugural address where he defended the free speech rights of those who called for the union to be dissolved, that there just shouldn't be a United States of America. And he defended their free speech rights. So to James Madison. So in the United States of America, when we don't like someone's opinion, we have a few options. We can offer a counter argument. We can walk a way or we can change the channel. What we're not going to do is enlist government jackboots to throw someone in jail or throw someone out of the country because we don't like their opinion.

So I guess I'm going to play devil's advocate because otherwise this would be a boring conversation. But, you know, when you see some of the folks on, I'm just going to say the far right right now because that's who tends to be mad about these things on supporting the Trump administration and what they're doing, part of what they're saying is like, well, hey, these aren't Americans, you know? These are people who are here to learn. They are guests in our country. They sort of have a like, you know, if you invited a guest into your home and they said a bunch

of mean things to you, you have a right to kick them out. Why doesn't that make sense as an argument? It doesn't make sense for a few reasons. The first reason it doesn't make sense is that we know from the Supreme Court in a 1945 case called Bridges v. Wixen that non-citizens are entitled to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. So that's been good law for 80 years now. So we know the First Amendment does apply to non-citizens. The second reason it doesn't make sense is that, as you mentioned, they're here to learn. Well, part of the learning process in a university is hearing other

ideas, hearing ideas that make you mad. And then if you hear an idea that does make you mad, offering a counter-argument in class, offering a counter-argument in a term paper. That's what an American education is all about. So we don't want international students to be coming here to to experience the wonder of an American education and then say, but while you're here, make sure not to criticize the government. Make sure not to criticize American foreign policy. That's not an education. That's something we would expect in China or Russia,

but it should never be an American education. And then on the last point of, well, they're not citizens, they are and the folks that we're representing here are lawfully present in the United States. And James Madison talked about this all the way back in 1800, that if you're in the United States, we expect you to abide by our laws and respect our Constitution. And in return, you are entitled to the protection of our

laws and the protection of our Constitution. And that has always been our understanding of how rights work. Remember the Declaration of Independence. We get our rights not because the government is nice to us and allows us to have rights. We get our rights from our creator. We have inalienable rights to liberty that our government cannot take away. So in the case of Khalil Mahmoud at Columbia University, you know, those protests at the time, some of them they got out of control, there were cops there. And so when speech and violence, like, because I think this is part of where, when I just heard a clip of him recently, and he was, to me, it sounded defending the violence of October 7th. How does, talk about the interplay between free speech when that speech

has sort of a defensive violence or something, because I think that's, One of the reasons people have, I think, sometimes an understandable response to speech they don't like is what it feels like it's defending violence in some way. And I feel like that's when it gets complicated for people because that's when you sort of get all the comments of like, well, you can't scream fire in a crowded theater. You just explain or break down for us in the case of some place where it was incendiary, the speech is incendiary and there was sort of violence around it like there was on campus. Sure. So a couple of thoughts there. The first is violence itself is not protected by the First Amendment. If Mr. Khalil or Ms. Ozter had been accused of and convicted of committing violence or throwing a brick through a window or something like that, the First Amendment isn't going to stand in the way of a criminal charge and properly. So what we're talking about is the simple airing of ideas. But when it comes to speech that you sort of mentioned advocating violence or seeing violence and saying, yes, I think that's a good idea. That's still protected speech. And I'll give you an example why. Remember in the days and weeks following 9-11 when we started to learn who was responsible that it was likely a group of al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan, it was incredibly common to hear people say we should bomb them back into the Stone Age, we should attack Afghanistan,

we should kill Osama bin Laden. Those are ostensibly calls for violence, right? People saying, hey, there should be violence visited against those people. But at the point that we allow the government to pick and choose who were allowed to say that about. In other words, you're allowed to call for violence against al-Qaeda, but not these other people. We start giving government a tremendous degree of control over which opinions we are and aren't allowed to say. So what the First Amendment does is it forever takes the government out of making that decision. It says, we can voice our opinions, whatever they may be. And if they cross into action,

if they cross into actual crimes and violence, that's a different story. But as long as what's being advocated as an idea, is an opinion. The First Amendment is always going to protect it. Talk to me about the Trump administration and how they've been approaching free speech in a variety of ways. Because I think one of the things that we were told going into, there's like a lot of people, I would say, who aren't comfortable with lots of things about Trump, but they thought he was going to be a really pro-free speech president, mainly because he hurls insults at people himself. And so they sort of had this like sense of no Trump's going to be hardcore. And Trump talked about being pro-free speech. He kind of led with that.

You know, it's, oh, no, it's the left. They're the ones that tamped down on free speech. But this has been, in my opinion, one of the most aggressively anti-free speech administrations I've ever seen in my life. And so what has your impression been of the Trump administration and how it has approached free speech in just the six months they've been in office? So the Trump administration very much likes to talk the talk when it comes to free speech. but they don't walk the walk. If you recall very early on in the administration, J.D. Vance went over to Europe and criticized some of our stalwart allies, and I might say rightly so for their free speech policies.

He criticized the United Kingdom, Denmark, and I believe Sweden, for some of their hate speech laws, which infringe on a lot of what would be protected speech here in the United States. And we agreed with those comments. But the problem is when it comes to their domestic policy and how they actually treat free speech here in the United States, it's no defense of free speech at all. an outright attack on free speech, whether it's non-citizens at universities voicing opinions

they don't like, whether it's law firms representing clients or advocating causes that they don't like, whether it's universities employing professors who might espouse views that the administration doesn't like. At every turn, what we're seeing from this administration is the attempt to use government power as a cudgel against people who voice opinions that this administration disagrees with. And that's where the First Amendment must stand as a guardrail against. Talk to me a little bit about fire, because I see you guys taking some heat online, you know, because you guys have always done, I mean, I followed you for a million years, and I knew about fire way back in my early 20s. And one of the things that's been interesting

in growing up in this turbulent political time is that I've gotten to see fire operate across a number of different administrations. And you guys protect free speech without fear or favor of which administrations in charge where there are sort of precious few groups that do that. But because for a long time, you guys did mostly campus work, I think a lot of people thought of you as sort of coded as people who are protecting conservatives' ability to speak on campus. And so you have a lot of people who are, you know, were conservatives who were pumped about your protection of free speech. I grew up on the right and also believed that they were the stalwart defenders of free speech. But I find the Trump administration to be absolutely the one of the most, like I said before,

one of the most hostile to free speech that I've ever seen. How is it for you guys to be in an environment where you are having to go toe to toe with this administration over its free speech policies, especially in an environment where so many other people are caving because of the threats and the bullying that this administration sort of brings to bear against universities and law firms, et cetera. Our philosophy is that we are nonpartisan, period. If what you say is protected by the First Amendment, we will defend it. We don't care what party you're in.

We don't care if you're a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Green, or anything in between. If it's protected, we'll defend it. Right now I have a case defending an LGBT student group who wants to host a drag show in Texas, and I'm representing two conservative students in Michigan who want to wear let's go brand in sweatshirts to their public school. we are proudly nonpartisan. And the First Amendment is nonpartisan. So when you bring up some of the flack that we get on the internet of people calling us this or that, we always have a case that I'm sure they would find much more sympathetic. What we find is that since we're defending free speech, we're often criticizing what the government is doing because it's the government that can

infringe free speech. So when Democrats were in power, a lot of our comments were rightly about what the government was doing, which of course was Democrats at the time. Now that Republicans are power, we're calling out their abuses of free speech, and it's people on the right who suddenly think that we're now a bunch of Democrats. We're not. We are free, we are protectors of free speech. And anyone who attacks free speech can expect to hear from us. Anything else that you want us to know about the lawsuit you're bringing right now or anything else we should know about free speech and what's happening? I would say, pay attention to this lawsuit because it's an important one. It gets to who we are as a country. And I'll give you a very quick example of how to think about this.

Imagine you have a friend from another country who comes to visit you and you go out to lunch and you ask them, so what do you think about everything that's going on in America right now? And they sort of lean over and they say, well, I'd love to tell you, but before I do, am I allowed to say what I really think? I think most Americans, Republicans or Democrats, we would kind of puff out our chest a little bit and say, well, this is America. Of course you can say what you think. The idea that someone should have to watch what they say in the United States, especially watch what they say about the government, is such a profound betrayal of American values and American liberties. So regardless of whether you find the speech of these Palestinian protesters sympathetic

or the most vile message you can imagine, it is always worthwhile to defend the Constitution and defend free speech because the only alternative is allowing the government to decide which views people are allowed to voice. And that's a very dangerous path to go down. Connor Fitzpatrick, thank you so much for coming on and talking to the bulwark. Thanks to all of you for listening to another episode of The Bullwark Takes. Go subscribe, rate us on iTunes, join us on Substack, all the things. If you love free speech, come hang out with us here.

Thanks, Connor. Book Club on Monday. Gym on Tuesday. Date night on Wednesday. Out on the town on Thursday. Quiet night in on Friday. It's good to have a routine, and it's good for your eyes too, because with regular comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers, you'll know just how healthy they are. Visit Spexavers.cavers.ca to book

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