Hours after President Donald Trump took his second-term oath of office, he signed an executive order describing his commitment to the First Amendment and the right he said it affords people to “speak freely in the public square without government interference.”

“Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society,” his order said.

Over the next 100 days, his administration repeatedly took action against people and organizations exercising their right to free speech.

Immigration agents on March 8 arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident and prominent figure in Columbia University’s Israel-Hamas war protests while he was a graduate student. The Trump administration said in court documents that Khalil’s “presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

Khalil has not been charged with any crime and remains in government custody.

On March 25, immigration agents detained Tufts University doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk. In revoking the Turkish national’s visa, the State Department cited a 2024 op-ed she co-authored in the student newspaper criticizing the university’s response to the Israel-Hamas war. A government memo said her “associations” indicated “support for a designated terrorist organization.”

The government under Trump’s direction asserted new control over White House press access, encouraged federal officials to investigate CBS for its coverage and attacked other outlets. Trump signed several executive orders targeting law firms that took on cases that countered Trump or that employed people who drew Trump’s ire.

Trump threatened federal funding to K-12 schools, universities and federal grant and contract recipients over their policy positions on diversity, equity and inclusion, LGBTQ+ issues and Israel-Hamas war protests.

His administration edited federal government web pages to scrub them of certain language; ordered Vice President JD Vance to seek to remove “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution’s museums; and removed books from military libraries. The administration purged hundreds of words and phrases — including diversity, racism, gender identity, climate science and Hispanic minority — from documents and websites, a New York Times investigation found.

Academics and pundits have criticized the administration’s actions, including some people on the political right who otherwise champion his leadership.

“There’s almost no one I don’t want to deport,” conservative pundit Ann Coulter wrote on X following Khalil’s arrest. “But, unless they’ve committed a crime, isn’t this a violation of the first amendment?”

Ilya Somin, a libertarian and George Mason University law professor, wrote that he has “little sympathy for recent anti-Israel campus protests.” However, “deporting people for engaging in anti-Israel, pro-terrorist, or pro-Hamas speech is both unconstitutional and unjust,” Somin wrote. “It also risks creating a dangerous slippery slope.”

The First Amendment, says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Eighteen scholars, including liberals and conservatives, wrote in a March statement, that “The First Amendment protects speech many of us find wrongheaded or deeply offensive.”

George Washington Law School professor Mary Anne Franks, a First Amendment expert, said Trump has shown he’s willing to use governmental power to go after critics. “He is waging an all-out assault against free speech, using the power of the government to try to dictate what Americans can say, think, write, study, and believe,” Franks said. “There is no First Amendment right more important than the right to criticize the government — without it, there can be no true free speech and no democracy.”

Trump’s complicated history with free speech

Understanding Trump’s second-term approach to free speech means understanding how he has historically described censorship.

After Trump’s supporters broke into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Twitter, now X, banned Trump, saying his account incited violence. Facebook, whose owner is now known as Meta, took similar action, saying Trump’s account violated its rules.

A year later, Trump launched his own social media app, Truth Social. “We will not silence our fellow citizens simply because they might be wrong,” Trump said when he announced the platform.

We asked the White House how Trump defines free speech and how his recent actions square with his statements supporting free speech. Spokesperson Anna Kelly said Trump is “leading the most transparent administration in history.”

“He regularly takes questions from the media, communicates directly to the public, and signed an Executive Order to protect free speech on his first day back in office,” Kelly said.

When Time magazine asked Trump April 22 why his administration is deporting “hundreds of people for engaging speech you don’t like” after he “castigated efforts to suppress” free speech, he referenced “tremendous anti-semitism.”

“I agree with free speech, but not riots all over every college in America,” he said. “Tremendous anti-semitism going on in this country.”

Trump’s Day 1 executive order, “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship” nodded to allegations by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others that the Biden administration had pressured social media platforms to remove certain content during the COVID-19 pandemic. The order said “no taxpayer resources” would be used to “unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen,” and described the Biden administration’s efforts as censoring speech “under the guise of combating ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation.’”

About two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, Zuckerberg announced Meta would end its third-party fact-checking program in the U.S., a partnership that enabled journalists, including PolitiFact, to fact-check false statements and hoaxes on Meta’s platforms. When a reporter asked Trump if he thought the Meta decision was in response to Trump’s threats against Zuckerberg, Trump answered, “Probably.”

Since taking office, Trump has repeatedly said he has protected free speech. In his March 4 speech to Congress, he said he “stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America.”

John R. Vile, Middle Tennessee State University political scientist and First Amendment expert, said the president’s efforts to “root out ‘wokeness’” tell a different story.

“Trump has simply substituted one type of preferred speech for another,” he said.

Trump targets include media, law firms and universities

It’s hard to narrow the list of groups and people Trump targeted for opposing speech or policy positions, but his actions related to news media, law firms and universities stand out.

On Feb. 11, Trump administration officials barred The Associated Press’ journalists from White House events, notifying the 179-year-old news organization that it would not be granted access until it followed Trump’s executive order to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”

The AP sued and a federal judge ruled in its favor, saying, “The AP’s exclusion has been contrary to the First Amendment,” and instructing the government to stop “continuing down that unlawful path.”

Media organizations remain under pressure.

Trump has described multiple major news outlets as “illegal,” and called CNN and MSNBC political arms of the Democratic party, predicting they would be “turned off.”

He called on Brendan Carr, the Federal Communications Commission chair, to impose the “maximum fines and punishment” on CBS for stories on Ukraine and Greenland, and said the network should lose its broadcast license. Carr was already investigating a “news distortion” complaint against CBS over the network’s editing of a pre-election interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris.

Carr announced in February that the FCC opened an investigation into Comcast and NBC Universal writing that they “may be promoting invidious forms of DEI.” In March, he launched a similar investigation into ABC and its parent company, Disney.

Law firms are also under government scrutiny and threat of punishment. Trump issued executive orders against five law firms; one example was WilmerHale, which employed Robert Mueller before and after he was special counsel in the investigation into Russian influence and disinformation in the 2016 presidential election.

In response, several law firms signed deals with the Trump administration, including agreeing to provide $100 million or more of pro bono work; others are challenging the orders’ constitutionality in court.

Trump’s order “violates core constitutional rights, including the rights to free speech and due process,” law firm Perkins Coie wrote when suing the administration. Trump had targeted the firm, which represented Trump’s former political challenger Hillary Clinton during her 2016 campaign. “At the heart of the order is an unlawful attack on the freedom of all Americans to select counsel of their choice without fear of retribution or punishment from the government.”

Beyond detaining Ozturk and Khalil, the administration has sought to revoke the legal status of other student protesters including visa holders and lawful permanent residents. “We are not going to be importing activists into the United States,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said March 28. “They’re here to go to class. They’re not here to lead activist movements that are disruptive and undermine our universities.”

The administration withheld billions of dollars from universities because of diversity policies and allegations of antisemitism. Columbia University’s response included agreeing to adopt a formal definition of antisemitism and hire a special police force to remove people from campus. Harvard University, meanwhile, called the administration’s actions “illegal” and refused to comply with its terms, which included changing hiring and student discipline policies and discontinuing DEI policies. Harvard sued the administration over its funding freeze.

“The freeze and the looming threat of additional funding cuts will chill Harvard’s exercise of its First Amendment rights,” Harvard’s lawsuit said. “Harvard will be unable to make decisions … without fear that those decisions will run afoul of government censors’ views on acceptable levels of ideological or viewpoint diversity on campus.”

Experts say people, institutions and media are receiving the message that if the president perceives their words, actions or beliefs as critical of his leadership or platform, they can become targets.

“President Trump has certainly not brought back free speech in America,” said Nico Perrino, executive vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an organization that defends free speech for people and groups on both sides of the political spectrum.

“In fact, since Inauguration Day, we have seen some of the most significant threats to free speech in recent memory,” Perrino said.

Judges have ruled that Trump administration violated free speech

At least seven judges appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents have said the administration’s actions have violated or chilled freedom of speech.

When U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden ruled in favor of the AP, he wrote, “The Court simply holds that under the First Amendment, if the Government opens its doors to some journalists — be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere — it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints. The Constitution requires no less.”

Another ruling involved the Trump administration’s executive order targeting the law firm Susman Godfrey LLP. The firm represented voting machines manufacturer Dominion in its defamation lawsuit against Fox News, which promoted false claims about Dominion’s role in the 2020 election. U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan said Trump’s order was “based on a personal vendetta” and a “shocking abuse of power,’ and that it appeared to violate free speech protections under the First Amendment.

Other federal judges also ruled on First Amendment cases; many cases remain ongoing and some rulings were in the preliminary stages. They involved law firms targeted by Trump, or Trump administration actions related to DEI, schools or transgender individuals in the military, including:

• An executive order targeting WilmerHale, which a judge called a “retaliatory action” that  “chills speech and legal advocacy.”
• Two anti-DEI executive orders. A judge ruled that the administration’s actions constituted “content-based restriction on the speech rights of federal contractors and grantees.”
• The executive order targeting Perkins Coie that the judge called “retaliatory and runs head-on into the role of First Amendment protection.”
• An executive order targeting the Jenner & Block law firm, which once employed a lawyer who had worked with special counsel Robert Mueller to investigate Trump’s 2016 campaign. The judge said the government’s directives were likely unconstitutional because they retaliated against protected speech.
• An Education Department letter that threatened funding cuts to schools over their DEI practices. The judge wrote that a letter “targets speech based on viewpoint.”
• A ban on transgender people serving in the military that the judge wrote “entails a viewpoint-based restriction on transgender service members’ speech and expression.”
•  A government memo about pausing funds to nonprofits. In her ruling, the judge wrote that “by appearing to target specific recipients because they associate with certain ideas, Defendants may be crossing a constitutional line.”

When pressed on the issue of free speech in specific situations, the administration pivots to other explanations. For example, in response to questions about the AP’s removal from press events, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Feb. 12, “Nobody has the right to go into the Oval Office and ask the president of the United States questions. That’s an invitation that is given.”

Similarly, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said freezing university funding was about protecting against “civil rights violations” because of antisemitism. “Let me be clear,” McMahon said on April 15 on Newsmax, “we’re not talking about First Amendment rights at all.”

And although Trump has pointed to antisemitism as a reason for targeting universities and students, some Jewish groups have denounced that rationale, describing what they called “the false choice between confronting antisemitism and upholding democracy.”

Seton Hall Law School law professor Thomas Healy called the administration’s approach “an existential threat to free speech and our democratic system.”

“Free speech protects the interests of listeners as much as speakers,” Healy said. “If the president can punish anyone who criticizes him or disagrees with, we all suffer because everyone will be scared to say what they really think for fear they will be punished next.”

PolitiFact staff researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this article.

This fact check was originally published by PolitiFact, which is part of the Poynter Institute. See the sources for this fact check here.