Surveillance footage of ICE goons grabbing Rümeysa Öztürk near Tufts last March.
Fifty-five student news organizations have signed on to an amicus brief challenging the Trump regime’s use of federal immigration law to revoke the visas of international students and deport them for speech that is protected by the First Amendment.
The brief was filed by a coalition led by the Student Law Press Center and joined by the Associated Collegiate Press and the College Media Association. Among the student news outlets lending their support to the brief are nine from New England, including our independent student newspaper at Northeastern, The Huntington News. The others:
The Dartmouth, at Dartmouth College
The Harvard Crimson
The Heights, at Boston College
The Mass Media, at UMass Boston
The Mount Holyoke News
The Trinity Tripod, at Trinity College
The Tufts Daily
The Yale Daily News
In addition, 11 student newsroom leaders, including one from Bates College in Maine, have signed as individuals.
Sayles Hall at Brown University. Photo (cc) 2021 by Chris Rycroft.
Recalcitrant administrators, emails and phone calls that go unreturned, and complaints from the people they write about — student journalists have a hard time, just as journalists do everywhere.
What happened to Brown University student Alex Shieh, though, went well beyond that. According to Jeremy W. Peters of The New York Times, Shieh was investigated to determine whether he had violated the school’s code of conduct. Shieh’s offense was committing journalism by sending an email to 3,805 administrators in March and asking them, DOGE-like, “what tasks you performed in the past week.”
As Dominic Coletti wrote for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which took up Shieh’s cause, Shieh was accused of misrepresenting himself by claiming that he was a reporter for The Brown Spectator, a conservative student publication — except that he was telling the truth. (The Spectator had gone on hiatus but was revived recently, so it’s possible that particular accusation was technically accurate. Not that it matters. You don’t need a news outlet to exercise your First Amendment rights.)
Two other students were also investigated. Though the Times reports that all three were cleared, the university administration has earned a New England Muzzle Award for its censorious approach to journalists who ask tough questions. After all, none of those administrators who were emailed had to respond, and reportedly many of them didn’t. FIRE’s Coletti writes:
Brown’s response here flies in the face of its due process and free expression guarantees, and threatens to chill student reporting on campus. Due process is essential not just to guarantee defendants a fair shake, but to uphold the legitimacy of campus disciplinary proceedings. It also acts as a bulwark protecting students’ individual liberties.
By the way, Shieh is an occasional contributor to The Boston Globe, and Globe columnist Carine Hajjar reported on his plight several weeks ago. She noted that one of Shieh’s fellow students at the Spectator criticized him because he “sorted scores of administrators, by name, into pejorative categories … all before having conducted a single interview.”
That’s pretty poor journalistic practice. It’s also protected by the First Amendment, especially at an independent publication like the Spectator, which has no ties to the university. Indeed, the administration is trying to force the paper to drop “Brown” from its name.
“Instead of chilling dissenting takes inside its community, Brown should be keener than ever to cultivate them,” Hajjar wrote. “Otherwise it’s asking for the Trump administration to swoop in with instructions.”
Among the most toxic behaviors that we often see in police officers is the tendency of some of them to overreact if they think they’re being disrespected. What they deserve, as public servants doing a difficult and dangerous job, is our cooperation. That doesn’t mean we have to like it.
Which brings us to Sgt. Jay Riggen, a Vermont state trooper. According to a recent account in The New York Times, in February 2018 Riggen pulled over a driver named Gregory Bombard — twice — for giving him the finger. Bombard denied it, but then did, in fact, flip off Riggen and cursed. Bombard was arrested and charged with two counts of disorderly conduct, charges that were later dismissed.
It got worse. The Times story, by Sara Ruberg continues:
According to the lawsuit, which was filed in 2021, the police circulated Mr. Bombard’s mug shot to local news outlets after his arrest and towed his car from where he had pulled over. Lawyers representing him said that last Christmas the state police issued another citation ordering him to be arraigned on a disorderly conduct charge in connection with the 2018 episode after the dashcam footage of his arrest was circulated and the police received public pushback.
Bombard last month received a $175,000 settlement. And Riggen, who retired at the end of May, is receiving a New England Muzzle Award.
An account by Juan Vega de Soto for the nonprofit news outlet VTDigger includes some other details. After pulling Bombard over, Riggen admitted that he was probably wrong in thinking that Bombard had flipped him the bird — not that it should have mattered. Vega de Soto writes:
In the ensuing conversation, Riggen acknowledged that he might have mistaken Bombard lighting a cigarette for the obscene hand gesture. FIRE [the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression] made the dash cam footage of the arrest public late last year.
In his response to Bombard’s lawsuit, Riggen admitted that he told Bombard: “Once I realized that you weren’t flipping me off, you’re free to go.”
As Bombard pulled out to leave, however, he cursed and displayed his middle finger, according to the civil complaint.
In the dash cam video, Riggen can be heard saying: “He called me an asshole and said ‘Fuck you.’ Flipped the bird. I’m gonna arrest him for disorderly conduct.”
Bombard sued with the help of the Vermont ACLU and FIRE. As FIRE senior attorney Jay Diaz put it in a statement: “We wouldn’t tolerate police officers who don’t understand traffic laws or parking laws. Well, the Constitution is the highest law in the land, and it doesn’t allow cops to abuse their power to punish protected speech.”
Now, admittedly, Bombard’s response to Riggen was not exactly the smartest thing he could have done. But it was protected by the First Amendment, and Riggen should have acted accordingly instead of punishing Bombard for failing to show him the respect his mistakenly thought he was entitled to.
As Dominic Coletti wrote for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which took up Shieh’s cause, Shieh was 