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A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration violated the constitutional rights of international students in seeking to deport them for their pro-Palestinian activism and criticism of Israel. The ruling is the result of a lawsuit filed by The Stanford Daily, the student newspaper at Stanford University, which claimed that some of its writers on student visas declined to report on topics related to Israel and Palestine, or requested their published articles be removed from the paper’s website, for fear of deportation.

“What we were hearing from the noncitizens in our newsroom and from noncitizens across campus — current students, former students, alumni — was that they were genuinely frightened because of what they saw in the headlines, what they saw happen to Rümeysa Öztürk,” says George Porteous, editor-in-chief of The Stanford Daily. Rümeysa Öztürk is the former Tufts University graduate student arrested and detained by ICE after co-authoring an op-ed encouraging Tufts to divest from Israel in her university’s student newspaper.

“The chill is the point,” adds Will Creeley, legal director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, the organization that represented The Stanford Dailyin court. “That’s a First Amendment violation every day of the week. It’s flatly un-American.”

[Democracy Now!] speak[s] with Brendan Ballou, CEO of the Public Integrity Project, which is part of a lawsuit against President Donald Trump over his plan to monetize access to his social media platform Truth Social, where he routinely makes market-moving announcements. Truth API went live on August 1 and already has subscribers. Truth Social is charging up to $100,000 per month for early access to the president’s posts, giving investors an edge on major news events.

“It’s profoundly corrupt,” says Ballou. “The government can’t discriminate who it gives information to based on who they are, what they believe, what they’re willing to pay the president.”

Reproductive rights activists are alarmed over a pledge by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to institute nationwide abortion restrictions. Blanche, whose confirmation for attorney general is currently before the Senate, made the remarks in a private call with anti-abortion activists that was later posted online. According to the audio recording, Blanche said the Trump administration is pursuing policies “so that the Dobbs decision becomes permanent in every single state,” referring to the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that ended the constitutional right to abortion and left the matter to individual states.

Amy Littlefield, The Nation's abortion access correspondent, says the administration is likely to focus on limiting abortion pills delivered by mail, perhaps by invoking the 1873 Comstock Act, which banned the mailing of “lewd” and “indecent” materials through the mail. Littlefield calls it a “zombie law from the Victorian era” that reflects the frustration of the anti-abortion movement's inability to reduce abortions despite victories at the Supreme Court.
“Abortion bans do not stop abortion. What they do is they kill and harm the people who need them,” she says.

Littlefield is the author of Killers of Roe: My Investigation Into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights.