She Defended Republicans’ Free Speech—And They Betrayed Her

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Attorney Jenin Younes has a long career defending free speech. This has brought her across both sides of the political aisle, with Democrats and Republicans trading places on civil liberty abuses. After four years of defending conservatives against Joe Biden, she’s now leading the fight against Donald Trump and his administration as they censor, kidnap, and deport foreign nationals who stand up to genocide.

Useful Idiots: Now must be a really crazy time to be a civil liberties lawyer. Tell us what you do and how you are trying to fight for civil liberties under this administration in particular.

Jenin Younes: I have a focus on First Amendment free speech rights. I was a public defender in New York, which is a very left-wing career. I ended up going into the civil liberties practice of law because I was really opposed to COVID restrictions. I thought it might hurt the poor and working class the most. I actually started defending what would largely be called conservative speech, people who questioned the lockdowns, vaccine mandates, the vaccines themselves, and the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.

For the last four or so years, I've worked mainly with conservatives, even though that's not really my political persuasion. Obviously, that's changed since October 7. A lot of the speech suppression that's been going on has been pro-Palestine speech. What is happening now under Trump is probably the most severe civil liberties and free speech violation of not just my lifetime, I would say modern history and possibly all of American history.

Useful Idiots: Why is the current censorship so historic?

Jenin Younes: Throwing people in ICE detention and putting them in deportation proceedings for writing op-eds is historically unprecedented. I don't think there's been anything like that ever. You had some during the Red Scare. There was some sort of echoes of that.

The fact that we are throwing people in ICE detention, tearing them away from their families, and deporting them out of the country for criticizing a foreign nation is so without precedent in this country that I really don't even have words for it. I don't know how many people they're going to eventually punish. I don't know if they're going to go after citizens next. I think they might because they've indicated they could. But what they're doing is chilling everybody's speech. That's a major concern in First Amendment law, that when people see others being punished for the same kind of speech they want to engage in, that they're going to say, ‘I can't risk that. I can't risk being deported. I can't risk going to prison. So I'm just going to shut up.’ And I would say that the ultimate aim is to entirely suppress any pro-Palestine advocacy.

Subscribe to hear the full interview with Jenin Younes on JD Vance’s “playbook of tyrants,” the age of Trial by Twitter, the turn of RFK Jr, a dangerous new legal definition of antisemitism, unmasking the doxxers at Betar, and so much more.

Plus, catch this week’s Thursday Throwdown: Tim Walz Says ‘Oops’ on Refusing to Break From Biden on Gaza

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