The Stanford Daily Publishing Corporation v. Rubio

Court: U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California

Date Filed: Oct. 15, 2025

Background: Since taking office in January 2025, the Trump administration has detained and attempted to deport noncitizens lawfully present in the United States, including students at universities like Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, who have each claimed that the government targeted them for immigration enforcement for their protected speech. 

The Stanford Daily Publishing Corporation — which operates and publishes the Stanford Daily, Stanford University’s student newspaper — sued the Trump administration in August 2025, alleging that the government’s actions had caused noncitizen journalists working at the student newspaper to self-censor out of fear of visa revocation, arrest, detention, and deportation. The lawsuit specifically challenges two provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act that, according to the student newspaper, give the government the “power to censor lawfully present noncitizens.”

One provision of the INA allows the secretary of state to declare a non-citizen deportable whenever the secretary has “reasonable ground to believe” that a non-citizen’s “presence or activities in the United States … would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” Another provision allows the secretary of state to “at any time, in his discretion, revoke” any visa issued to any non-citizen, for any reason or for no reason.

The Stanford Daily filed a motion for summary judgment. The Trump administration filed a cross motion for summary judgment. 

Our Position: In a friend-of-the-court brief joined by the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press urges the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to grant summary judgment in favor of the Stanford Daily.

• Non-citizen journalists perform important public interest reporting every day. 

• Allowing the government to wield removal and detention as a tool to punish protected speech would impermissibly chill newsgathering and reporting in the public interest, and do so in numerous ways.

From the Brief: “Allowing the government to deploy removal as a tool to target and punish reporting that it perceives as critical or unfavorable would give the government a powerful means of attempting to deter non-citizen journalists from engaging in protected newsgathering and speech and would thus deprive U.S. audiences of important reporting on matters of public concern.”

Related: The Reporters Committee previously filed friend-of-the-court briefs in support of Tufts University Ph.D. student Rümeysa Öztürk and Atlanta-based reporter Mario Guevara, each of whom were detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The briefs challenged the government’s claims of unfettered discretion to detain non-citizens for months or years, even when detainees allege that their confinement violates the First Amendment.