The Trump Administration has appealed a district court’s ruling on The Stanford Daily’s free speech lawsuit.
The move comes after U.S. District Judge Noël Wise ruled in favor of The Daily in an Aug. 28 decision. Wise found that several statutes used by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the federal government to revoke visas and deport legal immigrants on the basis of their speech were unconstitutional.
The federal government’s appeal sends the case up to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. While Wise’s current ruling applies only to the Northern District of California, a Court of Appeals decision would create a binding precedent across the entire Ninth Circuit.
The Daily initially filed the lawsuit on Aug. 6, 2025, after the Trump administration targeted several university students — including Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University and Rümeysa Öztürk — for pro-Palestine speech. The lawsuit alleges that these immigration actions chilled student voices and created a culture of fear on college campuses, and limited international student participation in The Daily.
The Daily is one of two plaintiffs in the lawsuit, alongside an anonymous student unaffiliated with Stanford and The Daily. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is representing the plaintiffs pro bono.
“Stated plainly, in the United States, freedom of speech belongs to the people. It is not the government’s to take,” wrote Wise in her initial ruling. Wise described the Trump Administration’s use of these statutes as “a viewpoint- and content-based restriction as applied to protected speech.”
The Daily has reached out to U.S. attorneys representing the federal government for comment on the appeal.
FIRE attorney Conor Fitzpatrick, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs, emphasized the importance of protecting First Amendment rights for legal noncitizens.
“No one in the United States of America, citizen or not, should fear a midnight knock on the door from a government official because they wrote or spoke the wrong opinion,” Fitzpatrick said in an interview with The Daily. “No journalist should fear that they are going to be thrown out of the country because they wrote an article or interviewed a source that the government doesn’t like.”
George Porteous ’27, editor-in-chief of The Daily, echoed similar statements.
“Our lawyers at FIRE are fully prepared to defend Judge Wise’s ruling in court, ensuring that we will uphold and expand protections for non-citizens to participate in student journalism, at the Stanford Daily and beyond,” Porteous said.