It is Sunday, January the 18th, and I want to begin this hour with an urgent new warning.

This is the United States District Judge William G. Young, a Reagan appointee on the federal

bench in Boston since 1985, more than four decades wearing that

robe. And he's been presiding over one of the most consequential free speech cases in the country right now,

a lawsuit over the Trump administration's detention and attempted deportation of foreign-born

university students and academics, people who protested Israel's

war in Gaza. Now, you may remember this disturbing video. This is Ramesa Ozturk. She's a 30-year-old

Tufts University doctoral student, grabbed off the street by masked plainclothes officers in

March of 2025. She was accused of no crime. She was sent more than

a thousand miles away. She was held in Louisiana for more than six weeks, again, accused of no

crime, until a federal court ordered her released on May 9, 2025. In court filings and hearings,

the allegation was stark, that what happened to her looked like retaliation, not for violence,

not for criminal conduct, but for speech, including an op-ed connected to campus activism.

Then there's a name you're also familiar with, Mahmoud Khalil, also 30 years old,

a lawful permanent resident of the United States. He has a green card. He was active in the pro-Palestinian

movement at Columbia University. He was arrested on March 8, 2025, and the administration moved to deport him under a rarely used authority that, put simply, lets the Secretary of State determine that someone's mere presence could harm U.S. foreign policy interests.

Mahmoud Khalil, a 30-year-old Columbia student, was somehow hurting U.S. foreign policy interests.

Mahmoud Khalil was also not charged with a crime.

Khalil was held at the LaSalle Detention Center in Jena, Louisiana for more than three months.

While he was in detention, his wife, Dr. Noor Abdullah, an American citizen, gave birth to their first child on April 21st, 2025.

ICE denied requests to let him be present.

After he got detained, it was kind of like a race against the clock for me, at least.

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