As the Stanford Daily’s opinions managing editor, I help oversee a section built around disagreement. Contributors make arguments, editors scrutinize them and readers decide whether they hold up. Some pieces persuade. Others provoke responses. That exchange is what college newspapers like The Daily hope to make possible.

The federal government has no business making participation in that exchange a risk to someone’s immigration status. The current administration has done just that, violating foundational constitutional commitments by using immigration authority to punish protected political expression.

That ongoing violation is what makes the Stanford Daily’s recent legal challenge against the federal government so important. On Aug. 7, 2025, the Daily’s editors explained why the newspaper had become a plaintiff in a lawsuit, filed the previous day by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), challenging the Trump administration’s use of immigration law against protected speech. They described international students becoming reluctant to speak on the record, staff members leaving their positions and writers asking to stop covering political subjects. Some requested that their previous articles be removed. The editors traced that fear to the cases of Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, two student activists detained by immigration authorities.

That account predates my responsibility for this section. It nevertheless describes a problem that directly concerns the work I now help lead. An opinion editor can ask a contributor to substantiate a claim, reconsider a sweeping assertion or address an objection. Those standards mean little if a contributor has already decided that expressing the underlying opinion could jeopardize their future here.

The resulting loss extends to everyone who reads the paper. An argument that reaches publication can be challenged. Readers can identify its omissions, dispute its premises and offer a better account. When fear prevents someone from submitting it, that opportunity disappears. 

On Aug. 28, U.S. District Judge Noël Wise of the Northern District of California ruled for the Daily and its co-plaintiff in a 90-page opinion, prevailing on six of their eight claims. The court held two provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act unconstitutional under the First and Fifth Amendments as applied to protected speech, including the authority for the secretary of state to revoke a visa “at any time, in his discretion.” It granted declaratory relief and denied the two claims seeking injunctions against future revocations and removals, finding that relief not appropriate at this stage. The government is expected to appeal to the Ninth Circuit, and the case could eventually reach the Supreme Court.

The litigation may take years, but the principle remains straightforward. The power of government officials is subject to constitutional limits. Their authority does not expand because a person’s opinions are offensive, because that person is unpopular or because punishing them would satisfy a political constituency.

Those limits are essential to my understanding of America. Our government must tolerate criticism from people who live under its authority. Officials cannot be permitted to treat opposition to their policies as a reason to withdraw protection from the person expressing it.

The administration’s conduct was un-American. It used the authority of the American government against a freedom that government is bound to respect. 

I believe this country deserves affection and loyalty. I find contempt for America particularly frustrating when it comes from people who benefit from its freedoms and opportunities while dismissing its achievements. There are opinions I would regard as unfair, ignorant or openly hostile to the country. I would argue against them. 

I would also defend their authors against government punishment for protected expression.

That protection has limits. Under Brandenburg v. Ohio, speech loses protection when it is directed to inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to produce it. Someone here on a temporary visa who crosses that line should face prosecution and, where the law permits, removal through due process. But the Daily’s lawsuit concerns punishment for protected political expression. The government cannot erase that distinction because it finds someone’s views offensive.

Freedom of speech gives people room to express judgments I consider terrible. My confidence in America cannot depend on officials having the power to remove its critics. Nor should anyone accept the premise that criticism of a president, American foreign policy or Israel establishes hatred of the United States.

The danger becomes apparent when we ask how a standard such as hostility toward America would operate. Someone must decide which statements qualify. In practice, that authority would rest with officials, such as the secretary of state, whose own decisions may be the subject of the criticism.

A student condemns an American military intervention. Another argues that the president has violated the Constitution. A third denounces the conduct of a government the United States supports. Each may believe that their criticism follows from American principles. An administration could characterize the same statements as evidence of hostility toward the country or its interests.

We should not have to trust officials to resolve that disagreement generously. Constitutional protection provides a boundary precisely because political judgments are contestable and governments have interests of their own.

The effects also reach beyond any individual enforcement action. A person uncertain about what officials will tolerate has reason to avoid approaching the boundary. The Daily’s editors documented the consequences of that calculation.

I expect better from my own party. As a Republican, I am deeply disappointed that this administration has crossed a constitutional boundary I would demand a Democratic administration respect. I refuse to ask less of Republicans. We can disagree about immigration policy while agreeing that the government cannot punish protected political speech. Both parties must uphold that commitment, and my fellow Republicans and I have a responsibility to hold our own officials to it.

Anyone comfortable with this power today should consider its exercise by an administration they distrust. Elections transfer authority. The justification offered for a power during one presidency does not ensure that its successors will use it in the same way. Constitutional limits must endure across those transfers.

At Opinions, we demand evidence, clarity and intellectual honesty from every contributor. Readers should be free to find an argument unconvincing and say so, preferably with an argument of their own. That exchange works only when contributors can participate without fearing government retaliation.

In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” The obligation reaches beyond our own party, our own citizenship and the opinions we find reasonable. I expect my government to respect the freedom of people I disagree with. I expect my party to insist on it. That is what loving this country requires.