U.S. District Judge William Young, appointed by President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, called President Trump an “authoritarian” this week.
Young, who is over a case challenging the Trump admin’s deportation agenda for pro-Palestine protesters on U.S. campuses, implied that he will issue an order restricting the government’s activities.
“We cast around the word ‘authoritarian,’” Young said, as per Reuters. “I don’t, in this context, treat that in a pejorative sense, and I use it carefully, but it’s fairly clear that this president believes, as an authoritarian, that when he speaks, everyone, everyone in Article II is going to toe the line absolutely.”
Last year, Young ruled that noncitizens lawfully residing in the country “actually have the same free speech rights as the rest of us.”
“No one’s freedom of speech is unlimited, of course, but these limits are the same for both citizens and non-citizens alike,” the decision added. It further stated that the Trump administration aimed to “target noncitizen pro Palestinians for deportation primarily on account of their First Amendment protected political speech” in order to “strike fear into similarly situated non-citizen proPalestinian individuals, pro-actively (and effectively) curbing lawful pro-Palestinian speech and intentionally denying such individuals (including the plaintiffs here) the freedom of speech that is their right.”
A separate Reagan-appointed judge, Mark Wolf, resigned from his position in November so he could be free to condemn the actions of President Trump. Wolf wrote in an opinion piece for The Atlantic that he “no longer can bear to be restrained by what judges can say publicly or do outside the courtroom. President Donald Trump is using the law for partisan purposes, targeting his adversaries while sparing his friends and donors from investigation, prosecution, and possible punishment.”
