The Authoritarian Coup by Donald Trump Is Accelerating--Legal Status Be Damned
Visa holders, legal permanent residents, tourists with return tickets, asylum seekers, all are being arrested, detained, sometimes tortured, and deported.
I am adding this to my original piece, because it is part of the same story.
[03/17/2025] One week ago, I wrote the piece below the first divider, but the situation has become far grimmer since then. The Trump administration has chosen to drastically escalate the constitutional crisis we find ourselves in. Over the last seventy-two hours, Trump and his minions have:
Invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, a law signed by John Adams in the wake of his political battles with the allies of his own vice-president, Thomas Jefferson. Along with the Alien and Sedition Acts (which we actually learn about in school, unlike the first Act), these were laws used to stifle dissent and deport “aliens,” a strange concept for a nation whose borders had not been established under international law until a mere eleven years prior with the passage of the Constitution.
Defied multiple court orders to deport numerous people, including an H1-B visa holder from Lebanon who taught at Brown University’s Medical School and worked as a kidney transplant surgeon. They also sent suspected “gang members” from Venezuela to El Salvador, where they have been thrown into one of the biggest human rights nightmares in existence, the prison known as CECOT. Key word here is “suspected,” and given how badly this administration is flagrantly violating the law with legal residents, nobody should take them at their word about anything. Mahmoud Khalil remains in detention, with no actual crime being reported against him other than he is Palestinian, and Trump is doing this to make Bibi Netanyahu happy—while also testing our acceptance
CECOT does not have enough beds for each prisoner, and they are jammed 65-70 people per cell. They are not allowed outdoors. They are not allowed any recreation. They are not allowed visitation. The prison has barely been open two years and an estimated 261 prisoners have died inside its walls. It is a torture chamber. The government’s justice minister in El Salvador has said that those who enter it will never return to their homes. This is where we sent our deportees, not even to their home country, but to a black hole. They did not get a court hearing. They did not get due process. At least one attorney posted to BlueSky on Sunday saying that her client was an LGBTQ asylum seeker who was transferred away from the court the hearing was scheduled in and deported to CECOT hours before the hearing.
As an additional side note, that little gutless weasel Marco Rubio retweeted the president of El Salvador mocking our courts.
Another German national (this one with a green card!), Fabian Schmidt, was arrested at Boston’s Logan International Airport as he was returning home, and according to his family and spouse, tortured on-site for hours by ICE before being sent to a detention center. This is the third German in the last month that ICE has abused and thrown into detention, with no explicible reason. All were legally present. All had a visa or a green card. It appears to be state terror directed at random at any foreign national, regardless of legality.
Defying court orders and sending prisoners to third-world countries with notorious reputations for abusing and murdering its citzens is what dictators do. Nowhere in the Constitution does this power exist. The Supreme Court gave Donald Trump a blank check last year in Colorado’s 14th Amendment case against him, and people were warned, but you know, eggs cost too much and inflation had everyone mad, so let’s throw out the law and the Constitution.
As of Friday’s close, the stock market had lost FIVE TRILLION DOLLARS in three weeks, a record. Those losses are directly driven by the stupid tariff war Donald Trump started because he lives in the 1920s in his Swiss Cheese of a brain. Eggs are at record high prices, and produce is about to go through the roof thanks to the same actions. People from border towns and cities are actually crossing the border to Mexico to buy large amounts of eggs and bring them back. This is not normal. This is not okay. We had a perfectly functional, healthy economy and it is being shattered. Tourism is going to take a major hit, because people do not want to travel here now. In purportedly seeking to deter illegal immigration, we are joining Russia on the very short list of nations nobody wishes to travel to, because we have an authoritarian President on our hands, and Congress is too weak, too spineless, too lacking in any principles at all to rein him in.
I have long prided myself on my intellect, but I recognize this is one area I’m out of my depth in. I can recognize all the hallmarks of history echoing through our nation’s rapid descent into fascist hell. I can point out the lies being told by Elon Musk about the government on both the legal and technical basis. I do not know how to advise anyone right now, other than to resist any encroachment on your rights as an American. Those rights truly die when we stop fighting to defend them.
The United States Is Disappearing Legal Residents and Tourists
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.