Masked immigration agents seizing a graduate student on a suburban street. Officers marching into campus housing and arresting another, ignoring his distraught wife as she asks where he is being taken. They have been among the defining images of President Donald Trump’s second term.

But with Mahmoud Khalil’s release on bail from federal detention Friday, the early phase of the Trump administration’s high-profile crackdown on international students who have spoken out in favor of Palestinian rights appears to have ended for now.

As a detention campaign — an attempt to confine the students while their deportation cases play out — Trump’s efforts appear to have been unsuccessful. In addition to Khalil, many of the other administration’s most prominent targets have been freed, while immigration agents have been barred from even trying to detain others.

Judges in those cases have sent an unequivocal message: The administration cannot detain people solely because of their speech.

“The unanimity of federal court decisions on this issue should send a clear message to the executive branch that it cannot snatch people off the streets for peacefully protesting and put them in prison indefinitely,” said Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School. “The federal courts have unequivocally protected the First Amendment rights of the noncitizen protesters in these cases, literally across the country.”

After being released from detention in Louisiana, Khalil flew from Houston to Newark, New Jersey, on Saturday and was headed home to New York City. He walked through a nondescript door into a Newark airport lobby, accompanied by his wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

He was quickly surrounded by roughly 50 supporters, reporters, lawyers and relatives. His fist was raised, and he could not stop smiling.

Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and legal permanent resident, had spent more than three months detained by the Trump administration, which said he had enabled the spread of antisemitism and had sought to deport him.

But his lawyers had denied the accusations of antisemitism and had protested his detention as unconstitutional.

Khalil briefly addressed the crowd at the airport, saying he would immediately resume his outspoken work on behalf of Palestinian rights, speech he said should be celebrated rather than punished. Asked about his message for the Trump administration, he said, “Just the fact that I am here sends a message.”

Trump’s second term has been rife with efforts to suppress disfavored speech as the administration bars news outlets from the Oval Office and cancels federal grants on the basis of words that its officials dislike. And while many of those efforts have been legally unsuccessful, it is difficult to measure their broader political effect.

In the case of the high-profile student protesters, if one of the president’s goals was to stifle the pro-Palestinian movement on college campuses, his administration has succeeded in some ways. The abrupt detention of foreign students may have had a profoundly chilling effect on international students.