It’s not just protesters. Trump is broadly testing the First Amendment.

Good morning. The First Amendment is a bedrock American principle, but the Trump administration is stress testing its protections.

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TODAY’S STARTING POINT

President Trump is engaged in a wide-ranging effort to challenge the free-speech rights that many people living in the US have long taken for granted.

The most prominent examples involve detaining noncitizens for taking part in campus protests. But the administration is also pressuring universities, investigating journalists, and even trying to reshape popular culture.

Conor Fitzpatrick, an attorney with the free-speech nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, calls it “nothing short of an assault on freedom of speech in the United States.” Here are four ways the administration is testing the First Amendment’s protections.

Targeting protesters

This week, ICE agents apprehended Rumeysa Ozturk , a Tufts PhD student from Turkey who expressed pro-Palestinian views in the campus newspaper. Her detention followed the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia grad student with a green card who helped lead pro-Palestinian protests there. Both are being held in Louisiana, despite a judge’s order not to move Ozturk out of Massachusetts.

The administration accuses Khalil of supporting Hamas ( which his wife denies ) and cited a provision that lets Secretary of State Marco Rubio move to deport noncitizens who threaten America’s foreign policy interests. The First Amendment, while robust, doesn’t protect vandalism or trespassing, both of which have happened during some pro-Palestinian protests. Yesterday, Rubio accused Ozturk of being part of a movement “involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus.”

But so far, the government hasn’t produced evidence that Khalil or Ozturk’s own activities went that far. Ozturk’s opinion piece in The Tufts Daily demanded that the university “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and divest from companies with ties to Israel. And even if Khalil did distribute pro-Hamas fliers, as the administration claims, “the First Amendment has broad protections for distasteful speech,” said Hadar Harris, an attorney with PEN America, another free-speech group. “The grounds upon which they are being detained seem to be pretty flimsy.”

The administration most recently accused Khalil of failing to note past affiliations with the British government and a UN agency that works with Palestinians when he applied for a green card, calling his claim that his First Amendment rights were violated “a red herring.” Khalil’s lawyers are set to appear in court today.

His and Ozturk’s cases may also test how far the First Amendment protects non-citizens. Fitzpatrick, Harris, and other legal experts argue that it does. They point to a 1945 Supreme Court decision in which Justice William Douglas wrote that “freedom of speech and of press is accorded aliens residing in this country.” But the court has never specifically ruled on whether the government can deport them for exercising those rights, and the administration argues that presidents have sweeping authority to set immigration policy.

In the meantime, their detentions have deepened a climate of fear. “It’s hard for me to think of a less American sentence than ‘Watch what you say, or else’,” said Fitzpatrick, whose nonprofit filed an amicus brief supporting Khalil . “But right now, for millions of green card holders and visa holders in the United States, that’s reality.”

Pressuring journalists

Trump’s antipathy for journalists isn’t new. He calls them “the enemy of the people” and criticizes reporters by name. But his second administration is now using the government’s power against them.

It barred the Associated Press from covering White House events over its refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” launched investigations into NPR and PBS , and shuttered government-funded global media like Voice of America . The goal appears to be discouraging coverage the administration doesn’t like. “The chill is the point,” Fitzpatrick said.

So far, those efforts haven’t wholly succeeded. This week, the Supreme Court declined to hear a case brought by a Trump donor that aimed to overturn a landmark 1964 ruling that protects news organizations from most defamation suits. Trump, who has sued multiple outlets for defamation, advocates looser libel laws.

Jawboning universities

This month, the administration announced that it would withhold $400 million in federal funding from Columbia, accusing it of failing to protect Jewish students from harassment. To try to restore the funding, Columbia agreed to ban protesters from wearing masks to hide their identities and place its Center for Palestine Studies and other departments under new oversight. The administration has also withheld $175 million in grants to the University of Pennsylvania over its transgender athletes policy.

Universities are supposed to be bastions of free inquiry, academic research, and debate, Fitzpatrick said. Trump’s actions suggest that “funding is being used as a crowbar to try and force-feed the administration’s preferred viewpoints.”

Reshaping culture

Trump has moved to shift the nation’s popular culture to the right. He took over the formerly apolitical Kennedy Center, purging its board, naming himself chairman, and suggesting he would honor more conservative stars. And he’s tried to require organizations that support writers, artists, and performers to pledge not to “promote gender ideology” in order to receive government grants.

The administration has also stripped certain terms — like “Black,” “female,” and “LGBTQ” — from government websites. Last night, Trump put Vice President JD Vance in charge of purging “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution’s museums.

What it means

The administration’s challenges to free speech have some experts worried about threats to other rights, too. “Controlling free expression is one of the very first things that you do when you want to undermine democracy,” said Harris, of PEN America. “This administration has done it in a very fast, very broad way.”

Read more: Leaders in higher education fear that Trump’s policies will dissuade international students from studying in the US .

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