Trump Administration Tries Deporting Europeans Over Thought Crimes

The Trump administrations war on free speech continues after they demanded that 5 Europeans be deported for the crime of criticizing the king.

Throughout 2025, the Trump administration has been at an all out war on free speech. Whether that is through the installation of political censors in news rooms, silencing critics on the airwaves, arresting political opponents, arresting judges for failure to rule in Trumps favour, criminalizing the act of lawyers representing political opponents, using the National Guard to crack down on protesters, attacks on the scientific community, the creation of a 24/7 social media state surveillance apparatus to search for thought crimes, or even just using masked jackbooted thugs with unmarked vehicles to outright disappear people, cracking down on free speech remains one of the Trump administrations top priority.

Towards the end of 2025, there was apparently yet another incident involving the Trump administrations war on free speech. Five Europeans were barred from being in the US because the Trump administration didn’t like their speech. From MSNow:

The U.S. government just banned five people from entering the country because it doesn’t like their speech. This ban, according to the State Department, is necessary to protect free speech.

If that sounds insane to you, congratulations on your reading comprehension.

On Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s State Department announced the “Announcement of Actions to Combat the Global Censorship-Industrial Complex,” which will take “decisive action against five individuals who have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose.” The five — former European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton, Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) CEO Imran Ahmed, Global Disinformation Index (GDI) cofounder Clare Melford and HateAid leaders Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon — are now blocked from getting U.S. visas.

That theory relies almost entirely on fabricated or grossly misrepresented evidence. When subjected to actual scrutiny — including three years of litigation in Murthy v. Missouri and congressional investigations — it collapsed. Courts found no evidence of coercion. Platform executives testified under oath that they never felt compelled to moderate based on government requests. The whole thing was nonsense, but has become gospel in MAGA circles.

Mike Masnick wrote the article and published a separate piece on TechDirt:

So even when Breton actually tried to censor Americans, the EU’s institutions rejected it. Meanwhile, Rubio is retaliating against Breton for that failed attempt by exiling him from the country—actual government punishment for speech.

But the truly egregious bit of the State Department’s move here was that they had Under Secretary Sarah Rogers go on X and claim that these bans were necessary to prevent “Murthy-style speech suppression,” which is an incredible admission, given that the ruling in the Murthy case showed there was no actual evidence of speech suppression.

As I wrote in that piece, this goes beyond routine lying. The State Department is weaponizing a Supreme Court case that explicitly rejected claims of government censorship to justify actual, unambiguous government effort at punishing people for their speech. They’re inverting the legal record—taking a ruling that said “no, the government didn’t suppress speech” and using it as precedent to suppress speech.

The State Department is literally using the judiciary’s rejection of censorship claims as permission to punish people for their speech. When an administration twists a loss into a win by doing exactly what the court said they didn’t do, we’re not just dealing with censorial hypocrites. We’re watching them test how far they can push before anyone stops them.

For what it’s worth Ahmed quickly went to court seeking a temporary restraining order on this decision, which he feared would be used to eject him from the country where he lives with his family. On Christmas day, the judge issued the TRO, with orders for a telephone conference later today to discuss further issues in the case.

It should go without saying that saying you disagree with the moderation practices being demanded on online platforms is not grounds to get kicked out or barred from entering the country. Terrorist activities? Criminal behaviour? Sure, but disagreeing with moderation practices? That should not even come close to being a reason.

Still, the move, as hinted at above, it definitely part of a broader country-wide crackdown on free speech that has been going on all year last year. Anyone who says anything that could potentially give the Trump administration the sads could see whatever government related activity suddenly go sideways. Trump sees himself as king and anyone who dares speak against him for any reason is basically considered a traitor to the nation that should be locked up or otherwise punished. This has happened multiple times before and it will very likely continue to happen moving forward in 2026.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.