In a New Lawsuit, Pro-Palestine Advocacy Groups Create Grievances Where None Exist

T he lawsuit that Democracy for the Arab World Now filed this week in the Southern District of New York is a confession with a case number.

DAWN, joined by a ten-member outfit calling itself the Taxpayer Alliance Against Genocide, asks a federal court to strike down Executive Order 14203. Signed by President Trump in February 2025, the order declared a national emergency to authorize sanctions targeting people and entities helping the International Criminal Court investigate U.S. citizens and allies supporting Israel.

But in a statement released by the U.S.-based DAWN and TAAG announcing their lawsuit, the executive order “prevent[s] US citizens from supporting investigations into US and Israeli abuses,” and effectively, that is “muzzle[ing] Palestine advocacy.” The plaintiffs’ theory is that the First Amendment guarantees them the right to keep supplying evidence, joint messaging strategy, and “specialized trainings” to persons the United States has sanctioned. The complaint runs 43 pages and never once doubts that it is describing a civil right rather than a federal offense.

This isn’t a quarrel with the current administration alone. DAWN’s own complaint says that its January 2025 submission to the ICC asked the Hague to investigate President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. A planned filing from TAAG targets President Trump, his cabinet, and senior congressional leaders for good measure. The plaintiffs’ project is hauling American officials of both parties before a foreign court that Americans never consented to join. The order stands between them and that project, so the order must go, so goes their thinking.

But their argument collapses on contact. Start where the court will start: standing. Nobody prosecuted these plaintiffs, fined them, or sent them so much as a stern letter. Their claimed injury is that they silenced themselves, and the complaint recites, at length and with evident pride, everything they have chosen not to do. The Supreme Court has seen this show before. In Clapper v. Amnesty International, human rights lawyers claimed the mere prospect of government surveillance had forced them to change how they worked, and the Court answered that plaintiffs “cannot manufacture standing” by injuring themselves over hypothetical future harm. As for the Taxpayer Alliance, its members began assembling their expected ICC submission in October 2025, eight months after the order issued and weeks after the designations they now cite as the source of their fear. They formed their alliance later still, for the announced purpose of preparing the very filing they now swear they are too frightened to file. Of course, it is ridiculous for TAAG to suggest that its speech was chilled before it even existed.

On the merits, the complaint calls the order viewpoint discrimination, because speech supporting the ICC’s investigations is burdened while criticism runs free. But the order regulates transactions with named persons, whatever the transactor thinks of the Hague. DAWN may publish every report, file every domestic lawsuit, and lobby every member of Congress; its own complaint boasts that ICC prosecutors “need only read a newspaper” to gather evidence against Israel. Just so. DAWN may even write for that newspaper. What it may not do is run messaging strategy for a sanctioned prosecutor or train designated persons in Rome Statute practice. The Supreme Court drew precisely this line in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, which upheld a ban on providing coordinated legal training to designated entities while independent advocacy stayed untouched. Try the substitution test: An American nonprofit demanding the constitutional right to provide joint strategy sessions and specialized trainings to sanctioned Russian officials would be laughed out of the courthouse, and nobody would call the laughter viewpoint discrimination. The First Amendment protects your advocacy. You may applaud the prosecution, but you may not join it.

The complaint’s centerpiece is its claim that the order rests on “demonstrably false” premises, chief among them that the ICC lacks jurisdiction over Americans and Israelis. Here is what it leaves out: The court’s own prosecutor was unsettled enough to ask the Pre-Trial Chamber to rule on jurisdiction before proceeding. The presiding judge of that chamber, Péter Kovács, dissented in part, rejecting the conclusion that Palestine qualifies as the relevant “State” under the statute. And Congress answered the American question by statute in 2002, in the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act: “The United States will not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court over United States nationals.” A premise disputed by the tribunal’s own presiding judge and rejected by an Act of Congress is many things. “Demonstrably false” is not one of them.

To be clear, the order’s critics have won real rulings: four of them, in three districts, counting the injunction against its substantively identical 2020 predecessor. But look at what those rulings actually protected: Three granted as-applied relief to named American plaintiffs whose pleaded speech, by their own complaints, concerned situations outside the order’s declared emergency: the Rohingya, the Taliban’s persecution of Afghan women, Russia’s war in Ukraine. In each, the government arrived without a record explaining why the net needed those particular fish. The fourth ruling is the one that reached the order’s actual target, the designation of Francesca Albanese over her Palestine advocacy. The D.C. Circuit stayed it within weeks. In every one of those cases, the government’s problem was the same: It could not tie a single plaintiff to the prosecutions the order actually targets.

DAWN, in a baffling display of incompetence, literally pleads coordination with the designees in direct support of the exact prosecutions the order exists to stop. And DAWN demands what no court has ever granted: a declaration that the national emergency itself is “spurious” and the program void root and branch. Courts do not audit emergency declarations; the Ninth Circuit has said so in cases running from Cold War export controls to modern sanctions prosecutions, and when the Supreme Court struck down IEEPA tariffs in Learning Resources v. Trump this February, it reviewed what the president did, not whether the emergencies beneath the tariffs were real.

A plaintiff with a genuine speech problem has remedies in existing law: the as-applied challenge others have already won, or an Office of Foreign Assets Control license. OFAC pointed them to the license application. They responded by asking OFAC to publish a FAQ instead. They didn’t want permission. They wanted a plaintiff’s exhibit.

The government will move to dismiss, and it should. Every motion to dismiss needs a statement of the facts. This one can be brief because DAWN already filed it.