September 11, 2026 — Judges, Words, Decisions
Check out this week’s blog post by IP attorney and author Timothy Trainer, host of the podcast and video show Tim’s Travails • Follow Tim on Substack
In November 2025, my Thanksgiving Day blog thanked federal judges for holding the line on the protections provided by the U.S. Constitution regarding free speech and ICE tactics. Nov. 27, 2025 — “Thanksgiving: Thanking a Few Judges,” by IP attorney Timothy Trainer « Timothy Trainer. Sadly, this administration demonstrates daily that despite court actions finding that the U.S. Government violated the rights of people within the U.S., it continues to trample on our rights.
Given the U.S. Government’s deliberate actions to ignore court rulings regarding free speech and due process, it’s worth taking a moment to understand what judges are saying, the words they focus on, and why they decide the way they do. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued a decision on August 28 that fundamentally finds in favor of protecting free speech using the rationale found in earlier cases: Memorandum-of-Decision-Stanford-Daily-Publishing-Corporation-et-al.-v.-Rubio-et-al.pdf. This decision is yet another example of what the courts are saying as they confront suit after suit where complaints about constitutional violations arise.
In the Stanford case, federal government agencies targeted students with visas. In other words, foreign students were legally in the United States, but expressing views the government disliked. As a result, the government initiated steps to strip students of their visas and threatened deportation.
It is no surprise that the judge in the Standford decision has to start with the basics by reminding all of us, including officials and agents of the federal government, of the words in the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . . or the right of the people peaceably to assemble[.]” One thing to note in the text of the amendment is that it does not use the word “citizens” but uses the broader word “people”. The judge in the case writes that “in the United States, freedom of speech belongs to the people. It is not the government’s to take.”
The decision informs us that the court received “testimony of 15 witnesses and 250 admitted exhibits, the court concluded that Secretaries Noem [DHS] and Rubio [State], and their subordinate officials and agents, by implementing the ‘mode of enforcement’ of the Executive Orders, ‘deliberately and with purposeful aforethought, did so concert their actions and those of their two departments intentionally to chill the rights to freedom of speech and peacefully to assemble of the noncitizen plaintiff members of the plaintiff associations.’ The court found that the government’s ‘ideological-deportation policy’ violated the First Amendment, and that this policy was arbitrary or capricious in violation of the APA [Administrative Procedures Act]”.
Anytime a court refers to “arbitrary or capricious” conduct, it does not bode well for the party acting in this way. It means that a party in the lawsuit acted without rational basis, ignored relevant factors or is simply making decisions on a whim, not reason. In the Stanford case, the judge noted that government officials could not define what it meant to “support a terrorist organization”. Government officials also failed to explain what actions constituted “anti-Semitism” as grounds for their actions to revoke visas and initiate deportation actions.
The judge made clear that if government officials could not give the court definitions or identify acts that constituted violations that subjected a person to visa revocation and possible deportation, how could the average person know what constituted a violation?
Ultimately, the court concluded that Trump’s Executive Orders and the manner of enforcing the orders as they related to the individuals involved in this specific case amounted to violations of their constitutional rights.
Today, citizens, noncitizens, documented and undocumented people are confronting a federal government, particularly the Executive Branch agencies, that feels emboldened to violate the rights of anyone anywhere within the United States given the lack of court-imposed penalties and punishment on those who repeatedly violate the rights provided by the Constitution. We can only hope that those who are victimized continue to have the courage to bring these court challenges and that the courts continue to protect and defend the Constitution and the rights afforded, given the government’s onslaught against the Constitution.
About Timothy Trainer: Writing books is a passion for attorney Timothy Trainer, who for more than three decades focused on intellectual property issues in his day job. He has worked in government agencies and in the private sector, and his assignments have taken him to 60 countries around the world.
Tim found time to pen a few non-fiction tomes, including his first book, Customs Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights;the 15th edition was published in 2022. Thomson Reuters’ Aspatore Books published Tim’s next title in 2015, Potato Chips to Computer Chips: The War on Fake Stuff.
Fiction was a genre he always wanted to try. In 2019, Pendulum Over the Pacific, was released by Joshua Tree Publishing. “This political intrigue story is set in Tokyo and Washington, D.C., and centers on trade tensions between the U.S. and Japan in the late 1980s,” Tim explains.
In 2023, his first series hit bookstores: The China Connection.
In 2025, he published the sequel, The China Factor, which ranked #63 on the Amazon Asian Literature list in May.
Coming this Fall: The China Dilemma!
Click here to buy all of Tim’s books.
