Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

How Trump’s Crackdown on Speech Has Damaged the Student Press

I serve as editor in chief and president of The Stanford Daily. Our newsroom has keenly felt the effects of Trump’s campus crackdown, which is why we sued the federal government.

A view of the campus of Stanford University.

In the most painful chapter of my time as a college newspaper editor, I watched fear of the US government silence my international student peers.

The height of that fear came in March 2025, when masked federal agents in Massachusetts seized a young woman named Rümeysa Öztürk off the sidewalk for co-authoring a pro-Palestinian op-ed in a student newspaper. That month, a Palestinian undergraduate sent me and my fellow editors an e-mail titled “Urgent Request.” Past Stanford Daily articles had quoted him speaking openly about the pain of witnessing the destruction of his homeland. Now, fearing Öztürk’s fate, he was asking us to retroactively remove his name from our pieces.

“I do not have the luxury of being in a position where I take my safety for granted,” he wrote. “Normally, I would be the loudest in talking about my home, but in this atmosphere, my literal safety is at [stake].”

The Stanford Daily staff agonized over the decision. Some of us saw a pressing need to protect a source. Others were concerned about the “slippery slope” of scrubbing old articles.

“I am basically begging you,” he said via e-mail.

These are the kinds of uncharted dilemmas that the Trump administration has forced student journalists and our peers to confront. They’re also why my colleagues and I at The Stanford Daily sued the federal government just over a year ago.

As our lawyers at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) argued in court, the government’s weaponization of the law to deport noncitizens based on their speech strikes at the heart of the First Amendment. At places like Stanford, it has produced an atmosphere of self-censorship for too many.

Last month, a federal judge agreed. “In the United States, freedom of speech belongs to the people,” wrote district judge Noël Wise in a 90-page ruling. “It is not the government’s to take.”

The news has brought relief and a vindication of the student press that so many of us believe in. But it........

© The Nation