The United States Is Disappearing Legal Residents and Tourists
As many of us warned for a decade, Trump has turned ICE/Border Patrol into a personal Gestapo, and is watching our reactions closely.
The Steve Bannon philosophy to government takeover, going back a decade, has been to “flood the zone with shit.” In polite language, this means that the MAGA movement should do so many things all at once that the defenders of democracy cannot keep up. It has been, sad to say, remarkably effective, although some of the effectiveness has been blunted by their own incompetence in firing people they actually need.
What is far more terrifying, though, than any of those prior actions is what ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and the Border Patrol have been up to. In the past few weeks, two German citizens who had travel visas in America that were current, Jessica Brosche and Lucas Sielaff, were both arrested and detained at the border with Mexico in separate incidents and have been held without access to attorneys in solitary confinement. Brosche was with her friend, a Los Angeles resident, and Sielaff was with his fiancee from Las Vegas. As I said, they had current travel visas, their passports, and their return flights booked.
We’ll come back to this in a second, though, because those cases have been dwarfed by this weekend’s actions. Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent legal resident (green card holder) who is married to an American citizen, was arrested by ICE on the campus of Columbia University Saturday on false charges (that his visa was revoked when he didn’t have a visa because he had a green card and that by organizing protests against the Israeli destruction of Gaza, he was aiding Hamas). His wife, who is eight months pregnant, was threatened with arrest because she knew their rights and knew this was a false arrest. She called their attorney, who demanded a warrant be produced. The ICE agents, as all such secret police thugs do, hung up on the attorney instead and took Khalil away.
Since then, nobody has heard from him. His wife and attorney only found out this morning, some 48 hours later, that he’s being held in Louisiana, which conveniently denies him access to either of them, and is a site so notorious that the ACLU described it as the “black hole” just last month. Today the Associated Press reported that ICE tried to take another student without a warrant Saturday, but the other students in the housing unit denied them entry. The White House posted a bizarre tweet today on the matter:
As a BlueSky user found earlier, this isn’t the first time Columbia has sided with the fascists.
And, in a truly grotesque display, the Anti-Defamation League (who have slid so far away from battling actual anti-Semitism that they barely condemned the blatant antisemite hired at the Pentagon as deputy press secretary) posted this statement.
Mahmoud Khalil’s only crime was to advocate for Palestinians to not be massacred by Israel’s indiscriminate assault on Gaza. He did not say, contrary to the claims of BETAR, a radical right-wing pro-Israel group and Israel Defence Force veteran and Columbia professor Shai Davidai (who himself antagonized and stalked pro-Palestinian protestors), “Zionists do not deserve to live.” Even the Canary Mission, a group that claims to fight antisemitism around the US and Canada, calls Khalil a “Hamas supporter,” but their entire page of “evidence” has zero proof, other than he wants the bombing to end and the university to divest from companies arming Israel. By those standards, I would be considered a Hamas supporter, as would Jewish Voice for Peace, Jewish Currents, Mondoweiss, and many other groups and publications.
The most vital part of this, though, is not Khalil’s advocacy or whom he advocated for. He is a legal immigrant, with a green card, and is married to a U.S. citizen who is eight months pregnant, and for using his right to free speech, he has disappeared into an ICE prison. This should terrify any citizen, any defender of free speech, any believer in freedom. If you believe free speech for me, but not for thee; if you think that his rights should be revoked because you disagree with his cause, then you are not a defender of freedom or free speech. The entire reason that authoritarian regimes and dictators always start with the people or causes that are least popular is to gauge how quickly the public will buck them. If we allow this to stand, if we do not loudly say how dangerous this is, how illegal it is, how un-American it is, then one day, in a very near future, it’ll be a citizen that gets disappeared. Someone who spoke on behalf of LGBTQ rights. Then it’ll be someone who spoke against unelected billionaires wrecking the government. And by the time everyone realizes it, it’ll be too late.
I know it’s exhausting. I know hitting the alarm constantly is a strain, and I know that people are struggling to find the capacity to speak out. We cannot rest, though. Our very freedom, our freedom and rights, are in grave peril. We must fight back, we must speak out, and we must never surrender to tyranny.