A recap of the trial over the Trump administration's crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus protesters

BOSTON (AP) — The Trump administration's campaign of arresting and deporting college faculty and students who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations violates their First Amendment rights, lawyers for an association representing university professors argued in federal court.

The lawsuit, filed by several university associations, is one of the first against President Donald Trump and members of his administration to go to trial. U.S. District Judge William Young heard closing arguments Monday in Boston.

He did not say or indicate when or how he would rule. But he had some sharp words when talking about Trump.

“The president is a master of speech and he certainly brilliantly uses his right to free speech," Young told federal lawyers. But whether Trump "recognizes whether other people have any right to free speech is questionable,” he added.

Plaintiffs are asking Young to rule that the policy violates the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act, a law governing how federal agencies develop and issue regulations.

Over the course of the trial, plaintiffs argued that the crackdown has silenced scholars and targeted more than 5,000 pro-Palestinian protesters.

“The goal is to chill speech. The goal is to silence students and scholars who wish to express pro-Palestinian views,” said Alexandra Conlan, a lawyer for the plaintiffs.

She went on to say that this chilling effect caused by “intimidating and scaring students and scholars" is “exactly what the First Amendment was meant to prevent.”

But federal lawyers and a top State Department official testifying for the government insisted there was no ideological deportation policy as the plaintiffs contend.

John Armstrong, the senior bureau official in Bureau of Consular Affairs, testified that visa revocations were based on longstanding immigration law. Armstrong acknowledged he played a role in the visa revocation of several high-profile activists, including Rumeysa Ozturk and Mahmoud Khalil, and was shown memos endorsing their removal.

Armstrong also insisted that visa revocations were not based on protected speech and rejected accusations that there was a policy of targeting someone for their ideology.

“It’s silly to suggest there is a policy,” he said.

U.S. lawyer William Kanellis said that out of about 5,000 pro-Palestinian protesters investigated by the federal government, only 18 were arrested. He said not only is targeting such protesters not a policy of the U.S. government, he said, it’s “not even a statistical anomaly.”

Out of the 5,000 names reviewed, investigators wrote reports on about 200 who had potentially violated U.S. law, Peter Hatch of ICE's Homeland Security Investigations Unit testified. Until this year, Hatch said, he could not recall a student protester being referred for a visa revocation.

Among the report subjects was Palestinian activist and Columbia University graduate Khalil, who was released last month after 104 days in federal immigration detention. Khalil has become a symbol of Trump’s clampdown on the protests.

Another was the Tufts University student Ozturk, who was released in May from six weeks in detention after being arrested on a suburban Boston street. She said she was illegally detained following an op-ed she co-wrote last year criticizing her school’s response to the war in Gaza.

Hatch said most leads were dropped when investigators could not find ties to protests and the investigations were not inspired by a new policy but rather by existing procedures in place at least since he took the job in 2019.

Patrick Cunningham, an assistant special Agent in charge with Homeland Security investigations in Boston and who was involved in Ozturk’s arrest, said he was only told the Tuft University student was being arrested because her visa was revoked.

But he also acknowledged being provided a memo from the State Department about Ozturk as well as a copy of an op-ed she co-wrote last year criticizing her university’s response to Israel and the war in Gaza. He also admitted that he has focused more on immigration cases since Trump’s inauguration, compared to the drugs smuggling and money laundering cases he handled in the past.

During the trial, several green card-holding professors described scaling back activism, public criticism and international travel following Khalil's and Ozturk's arrests.

Nadje Al-Ali, a green card holder from Germany and professor at Brown University, said she canceled a planned research trip and a fellowship to Iraq and Lebanon, fearing that “stamps from those two countries would raise red flags” upon her return. She also declined to participate in anti-Trump protests and abandoned plans to write an article that was to be a feminist critique of Hamas.

“I felt it was too risky,” Al-Ali said.

Kanellis, a U.S. government attorney, said “feelings” and “anxiety” about possible deportation do not equate to imminent harm from a legal standpoint, which he argued plaintiffs failed to establish in their arguments.

FILE - Tufts University student from Turkey, Rumeysa Ozturk, who was arrested by immigration agents while walking along a street in a Boston suburb, talks to reporters on arriving back in Boston, May 10, 2025, a day after she was released from a Louisiana immigration detention center on the orders of a federal judge. (AP Photo/Rodrique Ngowi, File)

People show their support for a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's policy of targeting students for deportation who took part in pro-Palestinian demonstrations on Monday, July 7, 2025, at the federal courthouse in Boston. (AP Photo/Michael Casey)

People show their support for a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's policy of targeting students for deportation who took part in pro-Palestinian demonstrations on Monday, July 7, 2025, at the federal courthouse in Boston. (AP Photo/Michael Casey)

Ramya Krishnan, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute, speaks about a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration over deporting students and faculty who took part in pro-Palestinian demonstrations on Monday, July 7, 2025, at the federal courthouse in Boston. (AP Photo/Michael Casey)

People show their support for a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration's policy of targeting students for deportation who took part in pro-Palestinian demonstrations on Monday, July 7, 2025, at the federal courthouse in Boston. (AP Photo/Michael Casey)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department has ended its investigation into Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, clearing a major roadblock to the confirmation of his successor, Kevin Warsh.

U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeannine Pirro said on X on Friday that her office was ending its probe into the Fed’s extensive building renovations because the Fed’s inspector general would scrutinize them instead.

The move could lead to a swift confirmation vote by the Senate for Warsh, a former top Fed official whom President Donald Trump, a Republican, nominated in January to replace Powell. Powell's term as chair ends May 15. Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, had said he would oppose Warsh until the investigation was resolved, effectively blocking his confirmation.

Republicans praised Warsh during a Tuesday hearing even as Democrats questioned his independence from Trump, the lack of transparency around some of his financial holdings, and what they said was his flip-flopping on interest rates. Still, Trump's previous appointment to the Fed's board of governors, Stephen Miran, was approved by the full Senate just 13 days after his nomination.

The probe was among several undertaken by the Justice Department into Trump’s perceived adversaries. For months it had failed to gain traction as prosecutors struggled to articulate a basis to suspect criminal conduct. Other efforts by the department to prosecute Trump's adversaries, including New York state Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, and former FBI Director James Comey, have also been unsuccessful.

A prosecutor handling the Powell case conceded at a closed-door court hearing in March that the government hadn’t found any evidence of a crime, and a judge subsequently quashed subpoenas issued to the Federal Reserve. The judge, James Boasberg, said prosecutors had produced “essentially zero evidence” to suspect Powell of a crime. Boasberg branded prosecutors’ justification for the subpoenas as “thin and unsubstantiated.”

The investigation was the most brazen attempt yet by the Trump administration to pressure the Fed to cut its short-term interest rate, which indirectly affects other borrowing costs for mortgages, auto loans and business loans. Trump has obsessively attacked Powell for not cutting the rate from its current level of about 3.6% to 1%, a level that no Fed official supports.

Instead, Fed policymakers, including Powell, have said they want to keep rates unchanged while they evaluate the impact of the Iran war, which has sent gas prices soaring, pushing up inflation. The increase could be a one-time shift but could also lead to more sustained inflation. The Fed seeks to restrain rising prices by keeping interest rates high, cooling borrowing and spending.

Powell said in January that the investigation was not really about the renovation or his testimony but “is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President.”

More recently, prosecutors made an unannounced visit to a construction site at the Fed’s headquarters but were turned away, drawing a rebuke from a defense attorney in the case who called the maneuver “not appropriate.”

Warsh said during a hearing by the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday that he never promised the White House that he would cut interest rates, even as the president renewed his calls for the central bank to do so.

“The president never once asked me to commit to any particular interest rate decision, period,” Kevin Warsh, a former top Fed official, said under questioning by the Senate Banking Committee. “Nor would I ever agree to do so if he had. ... I will be an independent actor if confirmed as chair of the Federal Reserve.”

Warsh’s comments came just hours after Trump, in an interview on CNBC, was asked if he would be disappointed if Warsh didn’t immediately cut rates and responded, “I would.”

Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren said during the hearing that Warsh would be a “sock puppet” for Trump. When she asked if Trump had won the 2020 presidential election — which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden but incorrectly claims was decided by fraud — Warsh said only that the Senate had certified Biden as the winner. When asked for an example of an economic policy on which he disagreed with Trump, Warsh did not name one.

The decision to abandon the Powell investigation represents a rare pullback for a Justice Department that over the last year has moved aggressively, albeit unsuccessfully, to prosecute public figures the president does not like.

Robert Hur, an attorney for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, didn’t immediately respond Friday to an email seeking comment.

Trump has taken other unprecedented steps to try to pressure the Fed, including an attempt last August to fire Lisa Cook, a member of the Fed's governing board, who was appointed by Biden. Yet courts have temporarily blocked the firing, and, at an oral argument in January, the Supreme Court appeared sympathetic to the argument that Cook should keep her job.

A key question still to be resolved is whether Powell will remain on the Fed's board even after his term as chair expires next month. Powell, who serves a separate term as a governor that lasts until January 2028, has said he wouldn't leave until the investigation was dropped. Yet he did not promise to do so if it was. By remaining on the board, Powell would deprive Trump of the opportunity to fill another seat among its seven members, three of whom are Trump appointees.

Other presidents have pressured the Fed to keep borrowing costs low, notably Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, though rarely as publicly as Trump. Johnson’s and Nixon’s demands for lower rates, however, are considered key contributors to the 15-year outbreak of high inflation that only ended in the early 1980s after then-chair Paul Volcker ratcheted the Fed's rate to an eye-watering 20%.

Associated Press writers Michael Kunzelman and Alanna Durkin Richer contributed to this report.

Follow the AP's coverage of the Federal Reserve System at https://apnews.com/hub/federal-reserve-system.

FILE - The Federal Reserve Board Building is seen as it undergoes renovations, Jan., 13, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File)

FILE - President Donald Trump listens to Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell speak during a visit to the Federal Reserve, July 24, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, File)

FILE - Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell addresses students at Harvard University, March 30, 2026, in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File)

Kevin Warsh is sworn in during his nomination hearing to be a member and chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee on Capitol Hill, in Washington Tuesday, April 21, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell leaves after the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC) meeting during the World Bank/IMF spring meetings at the IMF headquarters in Washington, Friday, April 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)