I am a First Amendment scholar. I protect the right of all to protest in accordance with free speech values. I also have personal and professional reasons to be concerned about some of the protests that have overtaken some university campuses.

Taking over buildings, shouting down classes and speakers, and assaulting staff is not speech. Some of those protest tactics seek to shut down dialog or use coercive, non-expressive methods to make change. Federal laws like Title VI, which prohibits discrimination and harassment that deprives students of their ability to receive their education, should be employed against some of the illegal takeovers of universities.

That said, what I love about this country is our tolerance for a wide variety of views, from enlightened and open-minded to the un-nuanced, ignorant, crass, or hateful views. Our free speech tradition is second to none. We have not always been perfect, but we have upheld the First Amendment rights of the following diverse speakers: Jehovah’s witnesses who didn’t want to salute the flag or put “Live Free or Die” on their license plates, neo-Nazis who wanted to march in a town of recent Holocaust survivors, protesters who want to burn the American flag, professors who don’t want to have to follow the orthodoxy of their institutions or want to place controversial and offensive items on their final exams, Communist professors who do not want to share their lecture notes or associations, nonprofit corporations who want to amass funds to create political documentaries, advertisements by civil rights leaders criticizing the sheriff of Montgomery Alabama, artists who wish do not wish to be compelled to create things that undermine their religious beliefs, students who wear armbands to protest war, a man who put the F word on a jacket to a courthouse to protest the draft, and so many more.

The way that the Trump administration is pursuing the deportations of foreign students flies in the face of this grand tradition. I am profoundly troubled by this administration’s justifications for arresting and pursuing deportation of students on visas and green card holders.

The administration’s interpretation of the Immigration and Nationality Act is that it has full discretion to deport people deemed enemies of the state or those who assist terrorist groups like Hamas. An interpretation of the laws that allows deportations of people purely for expressing political views would likely be a violation of the First Amendment, even if we can originally deny visas to those who advocate for the overthrow of our country or have certain affiliations. As applied to pure speech, the law is vague and viewpoint discriminatory.

There is precedent where national security interests override free speech concerns. For example, in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the Supreme Court upheld a federal statute that prohibited nonprofits from advising designated foreign terrorist organizations, even on how to conduct peaceful diplomacy. In that case, however, the meaning of “training” or “expert advice or assistance” was not considered vague by the Supreme Court. Those facts are in stark contrast to applying immigration law to a wide range of views about Israel and Palestinian rights.

In addition, the Supreme Court recently upheld the forced sale or ban of TikTok, partially on the grounds that the law did not implicate speech because it allowed for a divestiture and partially on the government’s stated national security concerns. The Supreme Court does give a great deal of deference to the government in articulating national security concerns. But this deference can only go so far. There was no notice in the Immigration and Nationality Act that merely writing an opinion piece, for example, would be equated with serving a terrorist organization.

But even if our Constitution would technically allow these deportations, because of the interaction between free speech rights and immigration discretion with national security interests, it is the wrong path to take. If Mahmoud Kahlil is being detained for assisting protesters in taking over a building, charge him with that. If Rumeysa Ozturk has done anything besides write an op ed in a student newspaper, please put forth this evidence. Currently, it appears that the administration is equating pure speech with illegal conduct. This flies in the face of our free speech doctrine and ultimately will erode speech for all of us and embolden illegal protests. If just text is outlawed, then people will also resort to the illegal methods we wish to curtail. Dialog, understanding, and knowledge is what we should be promoting.

In his seminal dissent in Abrams v. United States, Justice Holmes said that the American experiment, and the free speech experiment, was to let all ideas come to the surface for testing.

“But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas — that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.”

Justice Jackson, in his remarkable Barnette opinion, held that “[i]f there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

This is the way. This is the way to show patriotism, and it is the best way to support Jewish constituents while honoring the free speech traditions that benefit us all. Arresting people for what appears to be pure, political speech leads only down the totalitarian path. The administration should pursue those who engage in illegal conduct, or seek to deprive the rest of us of our right to express our opinions. But targeting people living and studying in this country purely for the conclusions they have reached is wrong, unjust, un-American, and unwise.