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Four major news organizations are seeking to unseal documents in a lawsuit brought by Harvard faculty against the Trump administration this spring, arguing that their release is essential to uncover the full picture of the government’s efforts to chill noncitizen speech.

The lawsuit was filed in March by the American Association of University Professors and its chapters at several universities, including Harvard, as well as the Middle East Studies Association.

When a federal judge sided with the plaintiffs in October, ruling that the Trump administration had violated the First Amendment by using immigration policy to silence noncitizen academics involved in pro-Palestine activism, he pointed to a tranche of government documents as evidence of unconstitutional conduct. But the documents remained sealed at the government’s request.

Now, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Intercept, and the publisher of Mother Jones magazine are seeking to make them public.

The documents include State Department and Department of Homeland Security memoranda that detail the reasoning that top government officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, used to deem deportable several noncitizens faculty and students.

Among the documents are also government reports — generated when the federal government began looking into the noncitizens whose cases were implicated in the suit — that included news clippings, social media posts, criminal histories, and headshots of their subjects.

In his ruling, Young relied on the documents to blast the Trump administration for using immigration policy “in ways it had never been used before” to threaten noncitizen students and faculty who had participated in pro-Palestine protests.

And during the summer trial for the lawsuit, Young ordered government lawyers to show the documents in an open courtroom, even as the attorneys objected on the grounds that revealing them would undermine the DHS’s internal processes.

At the time, Young said the court would publish at least some of the documents once the trial concluded and he had made his ruling, so that higher courts and the public could scrutinize the evidence that informed his decision.

“The public is entitled to know what I’m going to base my arguments on, and it may be used,” Young said in court.

But the court has not made the documents public since Young issued his ruling in early October. Two days after the order, New York Times reporter Zach Montague filed a letter requesting the documents be unsealed. The Intercept’s general counsel filed a similar letter later that month.

“It is imperative that the press and public have the greatest access possible to the evidence at the heart of this case,” Montague wrote. “That access would not only provide a full picture of the governmental conduct at issue in this case (which the Court found unconstitutional) but also allow the public to better understand the basis for the Court’s decision.”

One month later, in November, the Boston Globe’s publisher filed a formal motion urging the court to release the documents. The Times, the Intercept, and the Center for Investigative Reporting — which publishes Mother Jones, a left-wing investigative magazine, and the radio show Reveal — have since filed similar motions or joined the Globe’s.

When Young sided with the AAUP and MESA, he left open the question of what relief he would order for the plaintiffs. The AAUP and MESA have asked Young to extend protections for noncitizens across the country, not just to their members.

A hearing to discuss relief has been scheduled for next Monday.

—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on X @williamcmao.