Attorneys for the U.S. Department of Justice said a preliminary injunction to force President Donald Trump to unblock a group of plaintiffs on Twitter would “send the First Amendment deep into uncharted waters,” according to a letter filed Aug. 11.
The group brought suit against the president last month, in Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University v. Trump, 17-cv-5205, arguing that his decision to block them on the social media platform represented a First Amendment violation.
Trump uses Twitter to make official government pronouncements and take official government actions, plaintiffs argue. In blocking their individual accounts, the president has imposed an unconstitutional viewpoint-based restriction to what amounts to an open public forum.
In an Aug. 8 letter to U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald of the Southern District of New York from the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, plaintiffs said they were prepared to file a motion for a preliminary injunction to force the president to unblock the seven individual plaintiffs suffering “irreparable injury to their First Amendment rights during the pendency of this litigation.”
The government countered that the court should not let plaintiffs “seek, much less obtain,” the injunction, arguing that doing so would “raise profound separation-of-powers concerns by intruding directly into the president’s chosen means of communicating to millions of Americans.”
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