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…
Page B2From§Eachthe early evening edition — 14 September 2026
DHS visa rule dies one day before taking effect, sixteen days after losing the identical argument in court.
“They wrote a rule capping how long a foreign kid could stay on a student visa, and a federal judge had already told them, weeks earlier, that the last time they pulled this move — yanking visas off students for criticizing Israel — it was unconstitutional. So they wrote it again anyway, just slower, with a filing date instead of an ICE agent at the door. The students didn't move; the government's just 0-for-2 now.”
“Look, this was a reasonable, neutral length-of-stay policy — nothing to do with speech, purely administrative — and as for the judge calling our reasoning "exceptionally weak," well, that's a paperwork problem, not a — wait, did I just call a federal court's constitutional ruling a paperwork problem? Forget I said that.”
The receipts
Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV wrote that the administration’s reasons for a rule limiting the length of stay for academics and journalists were “exceptionally weak.”
The court ruling came one day before the new regulation was set to take effect.
· Trump admin unjustly revoked pro-Palestinian foreign students' visas, judge finds from the morgue, 29 Aug 2026
· Judge Rules the Trump Admin Can't Deport International Students for Free Speech from the morgue, 29 Aug 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.