A federal judge on Thursday blocked the Trump administration from deporting a British man who was recently placed on a visa ban after U.S. officials accused him and four other Europeans of online censorship.
Center for Countering Digital Hate CEO Imran Ahmed filed a complaint on Thursday against Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Attorney General Pam Bondi to prevent “the imminent prospect of unconstitutional arrest,” the suit reads.
“The government’s actions are the latest in a string of escalating and unjustifiable assaults on the First Amendment and other rights, one that cannot stand basic legal scrutiny,” it continues. “Simply put, immigration enforcement—here, immigration detention and threatened deportation — may not be used as a tool to punish noncitizen speakers who express views disfavored by the current administration.”
The suit adds that Ahmed is a lawful permanent resident with a wife and son who are U.S. citizens.
The complaint cites other recent cases where foreign nationals on student visas, including Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, were stripped of their documentation and faced with deportation as “part of a larger pattern of attempted repression of constitutionally protected speech.”
“The government has no power to punish Mr. Ahmed for his research, protected speech, and advocacy, and Defendants cannot evade those constitutional limitations by simply claiming that Mr. Ahmed’s presence or activities have ‘potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States,'” the suit reads.
The administration placed the visa ban on Ahmed, along with French former European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton, Global Disinformation Index CEO Clare Melford and HateAid leaders Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon, on Tuesday.
Breton backed the EU’s Digital Services Act, which compelled online platforms to tackle hate speech and misinformation and remove it from their pages. U.S. officials claim that the law unfairly targets American tech companies and citizens, Reuters reported.
On Tuesday, Rubio accused the five of leading “organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose.”
“Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States,” Rubio posted on the social platform X. “We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.”
Undersecretary of State Sarah Rogers shared Rubio’s message and warned that “if you spend your career fomenting censorship of American speech, you’re unwelcome on American soil.”
Breton criticized his visa ban, asking in an X post of “[former. Sen. Joe] McCarthy’s witch hunt” was back.