Trump campaigned as a protector of free speech. Critics say his actions as president threaten it

DENVER (AP) — When President Donald Trump gave his joint address to Congress last week, he boasted that in his first few weeks back in the White House he had “brought free speech back to America.”

But First Amendment advocates say they’ve never seen freedom of speech under attack the way it has been in Trump’s second term.

Trump’s Republican administration has threatened Democratic members of Congress with investigation for criticizing conservatives, pulled federal grants that include language it opposes, sanctioned law firms that represent Trump’s political opponents and arrested the organizer of student protests that Trump criticized as “anti-Semitic, anti-American.”

“Your right to say something depends on what the administration thinks of it, which is no free speech at all,” said Will Creeley, legal director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonpartisan First Amendment group.

Trump on Monday took credit for the arrest by immigration agents of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student and legal permanent resident who helped lead pro-Palestinian protests there. Khalil’s lawyers say the government is targeting him for his activism and to “discriminate against particular viewpoints.”