Ask an Expert: What Is Free Speech?

MEMPHIS — Today, a federal district court heard arguments in a lawsuit, filed on behalf of four plaintiff residents, to prevent the Memphis Safe Task Force from retaliating against them for exercising their First Amendment right to film the Task Force’s immigration and law enforcement activity. Plaintiff Hunter Demster has experienced approximately 20 incidents of retaliation for recording, including Task Force agents using their vehicles to swerve at him and box him in, pulling him over for unwarranted traffic stops, staking out his house, and relentlessly photographing and tauntinghim by name. At the end of August, Task Force agents sat outside his home twice and photographed or filmed him and his home. “The Memphis Safe Task Force cannot continue punishing me for exercising my First Amendment right to record,” said Hunter Demster, lead plaintiff. “For the last year, I have been subjected to a terrifying campaign of retaliation and intimidation simply for observing how the Task Force has overtaken our neighborhoods. But despite what the Task Force may think, every person has the right to hold government officials accountable in every state and every city, including Memphis.” The lawsuit also challenges the Task Force’s unlawful application of the state’s “Halo Law,” which criminalizes approaching law enforcement within 25 feet after one warning to back up. Task Force agents have repeatedly used the law to prevent civic observers, including our plaintiffs, from gathering information and recording their public operations. Recently, Task Force agents wrongfully tackled and arrested Mr. Demster, even though he was abiding by the state’s Halo law and remaining 25-feet away from their activity. Videos of this incident were filed as supplemental materials in court and are available here. Co-plaintiff Melissa Peeler has also experienced the Task Force’s unlawful tactics. “Over the course of this year, I have seen firsthand how the Task Force has tried to intimidate witnesses at a scene, either by boxing us in with their vehicles, taking photos of us, calling us by name, or by attempting to criminalize us by wrongfully using the Halo Law,” said Melissa Peeler, plaintiff. “But I will not allow the Task Force to silence me, my co-plaintiffs, or anyone here in Memphis. We have a First Amendment right to witness and record. We have a right to live without fear of being punished for observing what goes on in our own neighborhoods.” With Task Force abuses upending daily life in Memphis — a city already rocked by historic and pervasive law enforcement violence — ordinary Memphians have taken to the streets to observe and record their activities. While observing and recording Task Force activities, civilians have reported a disturbing and pervasive pattern of retaliation. Plaintiffs allege Task Force agents have: Threatened them with arrest; Physically intimidated them, including by swerving at or boxing them in with their vehicles, and making threatening gestures at them, like miming shooting a gun; Tailing, stopping, and questioning them without reasonable suspicion of a crime; Staking out their homes; Shining bright lights at their cameras and faces to obscure recording; Photographing their faces, vehicles, and license plates; and Repeatedly identifying and taunting them by name. “Recording publicly visible law enforcement activity is a core First Amendment right,” said Scarlet Kim, senior staff attorney with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “Like folks in Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere across the country, our clients have picked up their phones and cameras to document the massive influx of law enforcement officers into their community. In response, the Memphis Safe Task Force has relentlessly subjected them to intimidation, harassment, and retaliation. We hope the court will order relief against this egregious suppression of First Amendment protected activity.” Since September 2025, thousands of federal, state, and local agents have flooded the streets of Memphis as part of the Memphis Safe Task Force, a 31-agency Task Force that has aggressively patrolled the city at the invitation of Governor Bill Lee. Agents and officers working with the Memphis Safe Task Force have terrorized local communities, conducting mass traffic stops and large-scale immigration arrests. “Ida B. Wells-Barnett once stood in this city and shined a light on wrongs to expose them, even after she herself faced threats for it,” said Zee Scout (she/her), staff attorney at the ACLU of Tennessee. “Our four clients are doing similar work today. They are documenting what the Memphis Safe Task Force is doing to Memphians, and in response, agents have threatened them with arrest, swerved vehicles at them, and staked out their homes. That is not a coincidence. It is the latest chapter in a long legacy of trying to silence people who tell the truth about power. Our clients will not be silenced.” The motion for preliminary injunction asks the court to block the Task Force from retaliating against our plaintiffs for documenting their activity and from applying the Halo Law to them. The lawsuit was filed in mid-May by the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, the ACLU Foundation of Tennessee, Selendy Gay PLLC, and BraunHagey & Borden LLP in the United States District Court for the Western District of Tennessee. The named defendants include Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and the heads of DHS, ICE, CBP, the U.S. Marshals, and the Tennessee Highway Patrol.

WASHINGTON — Today, the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International USA released a new report, "Student Speech Under Attack: Suppression of Pro-Palestine Speech and Dissent on Campus," analyzing how higher education institutions, the federal government, and policymakers censored and suppressed speech in support of Palestinian rights and critical of the Israeli government. The report documents fierce retaliation against pro-Palestinian speech and expression that began in late 2023 and continues today. This repression has infringed on academic freedom and violated students’ and scholars’ free speech, association, and assembly rights across the country. The report provides an in-depth review of university and college administrations’ punitive responses to campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza, which has been declared an ongoing genocide by Amnesty International. The report documents how colleges and universities aggressively enforced campus policies and wielded disciplinary actions against community members based on their viewpoint, such as by suspending students, terminating faculty, and banning student organizations. It also documents how campus police and law enforcement used unlawful and unnecessary force against largely peaceful protesters, often leading to serious psychological harm and physical injuries. This nationwide crackdown has also contributed both to the rise of surveillance on campus to identify those who expressed pro-Palestinian views, and to universities’ failure to protect international students and scholars who spoke out under the Biden and Trump administrations from harassment and immigration enforcement. The report also details how the Trump administration retaliated against universities and colleges that were sites of pro-Palestinian and anti-genocide activism. Under the guise of applying civil rights laws to combating campus antisemitism, the federal government withheld federal funding and research grants to coerce universities into accepting overly broad agreements that curtailed lawful expression on campus. "Universities and colleges must take all possible measures to ensure that their campuses are spaces where students may exercise their rights to freedom of speech and expression without fear of unwarranted punishment or retaliation regardless of viewpoint," said Jennifer Turner, principal human rights researcher in the ACLU's Human Rights Program. "Schools should resist the pressures placed on them to silence and punish students or faculty who engage in protest or advocacy for Palestinian rights. Instead, they should stand up to the federal government’s intimidation tactics and defend the university’s core mission of fostering free-flowing inquiry and debate." The report closely documents the federal government's targeting of noncitizen students and scholars for arrest, detention, and deportation based on their political views and in direct retaliation for their advocacy for Palestinian rights. Such actions include revoking the visas and green cards of noncitizen students and scholars who engaged in pro-Palestinian advocacy – such as Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Dr. Badar Khan Suri, among others – and arresting, detaining, and attempting to deport them solely because of their political viewpoints and constitutionally protected expression. “Universities and colleges should prepare students for open discourse in a pluralistic society. Instead, campus leadership has suppressed free speech and peaceful protest while enabling the Trump administration to advance its anti-rights agenda and seek ideological control over higher education,” said Justin Mazzola, deputy director of research at Amnesty International USA. “The Trump administration’s targeting of students and faculty who oppose Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza is dangerously reminiscent of McCarthy-era censorship and a blatant violation of academic freedom. The Trump administration must stop stifling political expression on campus and end its relentless push for ideological conformity in higher education. Students' rights must be respected, protected, and fulfilled.” The report is based on a two-year investigation that covered instances at 46 public and 34 private university and college campuses nationwide, located in 28 states and the District of Columbia. It additionally includes detailed case studies of six universities and colleges that were sites of student activism: the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Michigan; Columbia University; City College of New York; Tulane University; and the University of Texas at Austin. The "Student Speech Under Attack: Suppression of Pro-Palestine Speech and Dissent on Campus" report concludes with recommendations for college and university leadership, as well as any law enforcement to: Uphold free speech protections for all students and scholars, regardless of nationality, ethnicity, and race, and ensure that campus policies on political speech and protest are viewpoint neutral. Refrain from adopting overly broad and vague policies against discrimination and harassment that punish or chill protected political speech. Resist demands from the federal government that undermine academic freedom and students’ and faculty’s civil and human rights. Impose strict limits on the deployment of law enforcement and use of less-lethal / crowd-control weapons, especially in the context of protests on college campuses. The report also includes urgent calls for the Trump administration and Congress to: Cease the campaign to deport students and faculty involved in Palestinian rights advocacy and end all pending removal proceedings against students and faculty targeted in retaliation for their lawful advocacy in support of Palestinian rights. Cease the misuse of Title VI investigations to compel universities and colleges to impose unconstitutional policies and measures that violate free speech and undermine academic freedom. Oppose any legislation that would punish noncitizens for exercising their First Amendment rights. Oppose any legislation that threatens free expression and academic freedom to suppress criticism of the Israeli government or support for Palestinian rights. You can read the full report and findings here. You can also read the executive summary here.

SAN FRANCISCO — Today, researchers filed a class action lawsuit challenging the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) policy of blocking grants in order to censor views it disagrees with, on everything from DEI to gender identity to climate change. The lawsuit alleges that NIH, the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, is unconstitutionally censoring research and allowing political ideology to override scientific expertise in determining which projects receive federal funding, contrary to congressional mandates. “Our study on Alzheimer’s disease was designed to better understand how to identify and reduce the risk of dementia in communities who are at high risk of developing the disease, who have been historically understudied. For more than a decade, our team has built trusted relationships with communities that have too often been excluded from research, giving us critical information that can help improve early detection and treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, work that benefits everyone,” said Ann D. Cohen, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh. “Losing this funding has forced us to abruptly cancel appointments for participants, preventing them from receiving promised research results, and slowing or stopping critical data analysis. This puts years of trust and scientific progress at risk.” “For more than 15 years, my research has focused on gender equity, sexual harassment, and the barriers that can push talented individuals out of science and medicine. Now, I can no longer accurately describe my research because using words like ‘gender,’ ‘equity,’ or ‘sexual harassment’ would be flagged as inconsistent with NIH priorities,” said Arghavan Salles, Double Board-Certified surgeon and Clinical Associate Professor at the Stanford University Department of Medicine. “Scientists should not have to scrub their research to receive federal funding, particularly after taxpayers have already invested years in supporting this work.” NIH is using a troubling list of 235 keywords as proxies to identify grants or researchers likely to express or support perspectives this administration does not like. The forbidden terms include “equity,” “advancing diversity,” “racist,” “gender,” “Latinx,” “climate change,” and “pregnant individual,” among others. This list is being used to review grant applications as well. Some grants and applications are summarily terminated or denied, while NIH has sought to renegotiate others, requiring researchers to scrub their grant materials of flagged words. If the researcher refuses, NIH terminates the grant or stops the application from advancing. The screening is being applied to already-funded awards and new funding applications, which have already passed through rounds of peer scientific review and been approved by the NIH officials that Congress has identified as the proper decisionmakers. This additional layer of ideological review is a departure from the NIH’s longstanding approach and contrary to congressional mandates designed to prevent the politicization of the NIH award process. Terminating or threatening to terminate grants injects an enormous amount of uncertainty into the scientific process, which relies on stable and predictable multi-year grants allowing the planning, relationship building, phased work, and implementation that scientific research requires. “My research focused on why people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds experience kidney disease and kidney failure at different rates, receive different treatments, and have different mortality outcomes. By understanding what drives these differences, we hoped to identify where patients are being left behind and develop better strategies to improve their care and outcomes,” said Jonathan Kyle Daw, Professor of Sociology and Demography at the Pennsylvania State University. “Our grant termination is a loss not only for my team and myself, but also the broader medical community and for public health, as this type of research is critical to achieving NIH’s mission and making sure we have a healthier society.” The lawsuit contends that NIH’s current viewpoint-based policies violate the First Amendment, which prohibits NIH from screening out projects or applicants because it thinks they’ll express views the government does not like. In addition, NIH is violating statutes designed to ensure federal public health grants are awarded based on scientific merit, not politics, and regulations limiting when the government can terminate grants. The plaintiffs are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Northern California, Protect Democracy, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and Jacobson Lawyers Group. The lawsuit seeks class-wide relief for all researchers whose work was unjustifiably terminated but whose grants have not yet been reinstated by a court order, as well as all researchers currently being impacted by unlawful, viewpoint-based policies that would lead to additional terminations, forced renegotiations, delays or application denials. Below are statements from litigators: “The Trump administration is weaponizing federal research funding to suppress disfavored views, pressuring scientists to censor their work or risk losing funding for research that might produce results that don’t conform to the administration’s ideology. While NIH can make calls about what topics to fund, it cannot do so in a manner that is inconsistent with governing statutes and regulations. The First Amendment also ensures NIH cannot screen out projects or applicants because it thinks they’ll express views the government does not like. NIH has crossed each of these lines,” said Olga Akselrod, senior counsel, ACLU Racial Justice Program. “Censoring research based on political litmus tests has severe public health consequences, particularly when it targets areas of research designed to address the needs of underserved populations that disproportionately experience negative health outcomes and some of the most acute health disparities.” “Using NIH funding to censor scientific research because of the perceived viewpoints expressed—for example, that misinformation can harm public health or societal injustice can impact health outcomes—blatantly violates the First Amendment and has stymied research about all types of ailments, from Alzheimer's disease to kidney failure. This isn’t just illegal, it hurts every person served by this research and unravels years of work by the scientific community,” said Shalini Goel Agarwal, special counsel at Protect Democracy. “We are proud to bring this lawsuit to uphold the First Amendment rights of our clients and return to a system where NIH research is dictated by science, not the views of whomever is in office.” “Upending the work of experienced scientists by employing filters to flag research that mentions terms like ‘gender’ or ‘minorities’ is no way to evaluate research on HIV, addiction, climate change, misinformation, or other important public health issues,” said Lisa Mankofsky, senior litigation director at CSPI. “The Trump administration has created an unconstitutional and illegal system of ideological review that is stymieing research into the starkest health disparities, including those faced by communities of color and the LGBTQ+ population, and could deprive us all of the treatments, the cures, and even the climate solutions of tomorrow.” “The Trump administration is unlawfully penalizing scientists because their research does not support the government’s preferred viewpoint on issues such as race and gender,” said Grayce Zelphin, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Northern California. “The NIH’s new policies, which are essentially a political litmus test, violate the First Amendment, undermine science and education, and have cost universities tens of millions of dollars in cancelled grants.” “The NIH's attempts to limit how doctors, researchers, and ultimately the public talk and think about medical research is unlawful,” said Lynn Eisenberg, partner at Jacobson Lawyers Group PLLC. “We are proud to stand with the brave biomedical researchers and scientists challenging the NIH's attempt to silence viewpoints that don't align with their own.” You can find the complaint here.

DENVER — In a split opinion, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday held that a classroom censorship law that went into effect in Oklahoma in 2021 does not censor concepts related to race and gender in the classroom. The law, one of a rash of state-level classroom censorship laws that have pervaded the country since 2021, prohibited teachers from “making part of a course” eight concepts related to race and gender. The district court had blocked enforcement of several provisions of the law including two of the most confusingly worded concepts in 2024, while leaving the rest of the law in place. While yesterday’s ruling vacates that preliminary injunction, two judges on the three-judge panel interpreted the law so narrowly that it does not prohibit schools from presenting robust instruction on issues related to identity and discrimination. In a dissent, Judge Nancy Moritz pointed out that the majority was “attempt[ing] to rescue an obviously vague statute” and that she would have blocked enforcement of the law “in full.” “The majority’s narrow reading of the law means that H.B. 1775 is no longer a barrier to inclusive teaching and honest discussions about race and gender,” said Emerson Sykes, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “This decision will provide much-needed relief to students and educators across the state who can once again teach, learn, and discuss the world around them without fear of punishment under this law. We hope that this ruling constrains any Oklahoma officials tempted to use this law to censor educators.” “Oklahoma students deserve a nuanced education of race, gender, and American history,” said Megan Lambert, legal director with the ACLU of Oklahoma. “Such nuanced instruction may now return to Oklahoma classrooms. This ruling narrowed Oklahoma’s censorship law out of existence by interpreting it to only prohibit educators from affirmatively encouraging discrimination. We stand with Oklahoma educators and will continue to ensure Oklahoma classrooms are free from state censorship.” The suit was originally filed in 2021 by the ACLU, the ACLU of Oklahoma, Lawyers Committee, and McDermott, Will & Schulte LLP filed suit against HB 1775 on behalf of a broad group of public school teachers and students. “As Judge Moritz correctly relays in her dissent, 'teaching is far broader in scope than dispensing a sterile set of correct-or-incorrect facts to students—teaching involves responding to questions, leading open-ended discussions, and exploring real-world parallels to, and the legacies of, historical events,' said Michael Pillera, Director of the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “The majority decision, while grossly misunderstanding the role of teachers and deeply underappreciating the intellectual journey students take in classrooms throughout Oklahoma, stymies a vague law's most harmful reach. The majority states that teachers only violate the law if they present an 'unqualified racist or sexist assertion' as fact, something the broad majority of teachers are clearly not doing.” For more information about the OK NAACP v. Drummond, see here.