On September 30th, Judge William Young of the District Court of Massachusetts provided a remarkable example of what can only be described as a singular profile in courage when he struck down the Administration’s deportation of foreign students and academics for their political speech. The case – American Association of University Professors v. Marco Rubio, found unequivocally that the government violated the First Amendment by targeting (rather aggressively and with little aforethought) non-citizens based solely on their point of view.

Picture the young student protagonist, bespectacled Rümeysa Öztürk, on a cloudy spring afternoon in Somerville, Massachusetts, on her way to an iftar dinner, the meal that breaks the Ramadan fast. She was probably looking forward to an evening with friends, a shared meal, some form of bonding with her fellow Muslims in America. The kind of peculiar mixture of belonging and non-belonging that is emblematic of the new-immigrant experience.

She never made it!