On January 20, 2025, his first day back in office, Donald Trump signed an executive order titled "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship." The order said, in writing, that "government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society." He had spent the campaign saying that if we don't have free speech, we don't have a free country, and that it's as simple as that.
It is worth taking him at his word, because his own administration spent the following year doing the opposite of what that order promised, and the record of it is not hidden. It is in federal court rulings, in the words of judges he and his own party appointed.
Start with the people who got detained for saying things.
The administration built what a federal judge called an ideological deportation policy, aimed at removing noncitizens from the country over political speech. Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident, was detained over his involvement in protests at Columbia. Rümeysa Öztürk, a graduate student at Tufts, was locked up for forty-five days and had her visa quietly canceled because she co-authored an op-ed criticizing her university's ties to Israel. Not a crime. An op-ed. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the quiet part into a microphone: "We are not going to be importing activists into the United States."
In September 2025, a federal judge named William Young, appointed by Ronald Reagan, ruled against the administration and did not mince words. He found that officials, including Rubio and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, had "deliberately and with purposeful aforethought" acted to "chill the rights to freedom of speech and peacefully to assemble." He said he saw virtually no evidence that anyone in the administration had seriously questioned whether pure political speech in support of Palestine could really be treated as support for terrorism. They just decided it could.
A year later it happened again. In August 2026, in a case brought by student journalists at The Stanford Daily, Judge Noël Wise struck down parts of the deportation policy and wrote something worth memorizing: "Freedom of speech is illusory if we are only free to express complimentary views about the government and its leaders." She warned that tomorrow, the targets "may include anyone in the United States who exercises their freedom of speech to simply express opinions the government does not like."
It did not stop at protesters. The administration signed executive orders targeting specific law firms, punishing them for representing his opponents or employing people who had crossed him. Perkins Coie, one of the firms, sued and called it what it was: an unlawful attack on the freedom of all Americans to choose their own lawyer without fear of retribution from the government. It pressured the press, asserting new control over White House access and pushing federal officials to investigate CBS over its coverage. Georgetown University's Free Speech Project has tracked these moves as jawboning, which is the practice of using the raw force of government authority to pressure media, universities, libraries, and law firms into falling in line. Harvard sued over a funding freeze it said was designed to chill its First Amendment rights. The antisemitism executive order directs universities to monitor and report noncitizen students' protected speech to immigration officials.
And running alongside all of it, at the state level, legislatures have spent the same period rewriting protest law itself. Since the 2025 inauguration, states have raised penalties for common protest tactics like blocking a road, and expanded who can be charged so that it is no longer just the person marching but the organizers and the people who funded them. One 2026 law made it a jailable offense to hold a sign or chant within a hundred feet of a place of religious worship. The nonpartisan International Center for Not-for-Profit Law keeps a live database of these bills, state by state, called the US Protest Law Tracker.
Here is the part they are counting on you to miss. This is the same machinery, working from both ends at once. The federal government reaches for the people with the least protection, the noncitizen, the student, the visa holder, because they are the easiest to make an example of and the least likely to have anyone come to their defense. The states quietly raise the cost of showing up at all, for everyone. And the whole time, the paper that started it says the government is committed to free expression in the public square without interference.
The concern for free speech is the costume. Control over who gets to speak is what’s underneath.
There is one thing that should keep you from despair. They keep losing in court. Judges across the spectrum, have looked at this and called it unconstitutional. The First Amendment is still doing its job, but only because people kept suing, kept showing up, kept refusing to be quiet about it. It does not defend itself.
So here is what you can do with this. Look up your own state on the US Protest Law Tracker and find out what they are trying to pass where you live, because these bills move fastest when nobody is watching. Support the legal organizations actually litigating this, the ones putting it in front of judges, because that is where it keeps getting stopped. And keep showing up, out loud, on the record, because the right to dissent has never once been the weak point of this country.
