The Trump administration has flooded the zone with unprecedented and unlawful actions since January — from effectively shuttering the US Agency for International Development to attempting to end birthright citizenship by executive order.
But what has been going on over the past three weeks is different: It is a blatant, brazen shift toward authoritarianism.
Since March 6, at least 10 students or university faculty have had deportation proceedings initiated against them by the federal government as part of a sudden, widespread crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech and criticism of the United States’ support of Israel. Several have been arrested and transported to immigration detention centers. On March 27, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that his department may have revoked up to 300 visas already. “We do it every day,” he said at a press conference. “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas.”
And all of this is likely merely the beginning of a wave of actions aimed at intimidating not only foreign-born students but domestic critics as well.
One of the first students detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Mahmoud Khalil of Columbia University, played a high-profile leadership role in campus protests. But Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, special counsel at Human Rights First, says he is seeing the government also target people who simply attended protests.
He represents one such student, Yunsheo Chung, also a Columbia University student and a South Korean national who moved to the United States with her parents when she was 7 years old. She, like Khalil, is a legal permanent resident.
“We know that private groups are scouring the internet for any indication of noncitizens who attended protests and are feeding that information to the government…. It will be a relatively large group targeted if we’re talking about people who are legally in the US and just attended campus protests,” says Colangelo-Bryan. He is referring to entities like the WhatsApp group Columbia Alumni for Israel and Canary Mission, both of which have doxxed students involved in campus protests. Another group, Betar US, has said it is sharing the names of pro-Palestinian protesters directly with the administration in hopes they will be deported.
Foreign nationals are often the first to be individually targeted by an illiberal or authoritarian regime — visa restrictions are easy for a government to use as a tool of repression. In fact, Freedom House has documented a decade-long rise worldwide in the use of immigration controls, especially deportation or denying entry at the border, as retaliation against foreign nationals who criticize strongmen. The biggest offenders include China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia — and now it looks as if the United States is aspiring to join their ranks.
“This is a crackdown on speech the government doesn’t like that we haven’t seen since the McCarthy era,” says Larry Diamond, a senior fellow and democracy expert at the Hoover Institution.
But he warns that targeting noncitizens is just the first page out of the dictators’ playbook.
“Every US citizen should be concerned. The government has all kinds of ways to target people. You can’t separate what is happening to these students from the assault on law firms, the assault on universities, the assault on public broadcasting. We are seeing a willingness to weaponize government power to silence critical voices,” Diamond says.
In fact, from the outset the Trump administration declared its intention to target ideological opposition, especially on university campuses. The president issued two executive orders, one on Jan. 20 and another on Jan. 29: The first states the government’s intention to target noncitizens who hold “hateful views” and who “bear hostile attitudes toward [America’s] citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles.” The second promises to target “leftist, anti-American colleges and universities,” and “resident aliens who participated in pro-jihadist protests.” To them, the government said, “we will find you … and deport you.”
The administration claims that the people it is targeting engaged in “spreading Hamas propaganda,” “agitating and supporting Hamas,” or “promoting antisemitism on social media” but has provided no evidence that any of these individuals has done anything other than participate in protests, write op-eds, or post commentary on social media. These are, of course, all actions that are protected by the First Amendment, regardless of a person’s immigration status. “Speech alone should not be grounds for deportation,” Diamond says. “And I say this as someone who completely disagrees with a lot of pro-Palestinian views. So unless the administration can provide evidence of anything else, we are in very dangerous territory.”
Human rights experts agree. Justin Mazzola, a researcher at Amnesty International USA, says the administration is running roughshod over not only the right to free expression but also noncitizens’ right to due process. Colangelo-Bryan says the law being invoked to deport students — a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act stating that if a noncitizen poses a risk to US foreign policy objectives, they are deportable — has almost never been used before. “To my knowledge it’s only ever been used once,” and not in a case like the ones involving students and faculty, Colangelo-Bryan says.
And anyway, adds Mazzola, even if federal officials had grounds to deport them, they have yet to present the evidence. “Have a hearing, display the evidence. People have a right to confront their accusers regardless of immigration status,” he says.
But the government doesn’t appear to have any interest in a fair hearing. So far, officials have gone out of their way to subvert due process.
Masked immigration agents showed up at Badar Khan Suri’s home in Virginia on March 17, where he lives with his wife, a US citizen of Palestinian heritage, and their three children. They arrested him and transported him to an airport in Louisiana, and then reportedly took him to a detention center in Prairieland, Texas. On March 5, the Department of State told a Columbia University graduate student, Ranjani Srinivasan, that her student visa was cancelled. She was not given a reason. She fled back to her home country, India, after the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement accusing her of being a terrorist sympathizer.
On March 25, a Tufts University student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was surrounded by six masked agents on a street in Somerville, handcuffed, and hustled into an unmarked SUV. She was flown to Louisiana the next morning and detained there. Her lawyer and family were unable to get in touch with her for more than 24 hours.
To be clear, none of these are standard procedures for immigration enforcement. Although the immigration system has been rife with due process issues for years, what is happening to these students is on another level.
The use of masked agents is particularly indefensible. “What would you think if a bunch of masked people in regular clothes surrounded you on the street?” says Colangelo-Bryan. “You’d think you were being kidnapped by a gang.”
Mazzola also points out that the government is abusing the deportation process by sending students to detention facilities in Louisiana and Texas. This serves two purposes, he says. The first is to separate them from their families and support structures that might help them fight their case, including access to a lawyer. Khalil’s wife, for example, is eight months pregnant and cannot travel from New York to Louisiana. The second is to place these students in conservative judicial districts where judges may be less likely to look sympathetically on them.
All of this is to say, when a government is willing to grab people off the street and throw them in detention, we have to recognize these are not the actions of a functioning democracy. They are the actions of an authoritarian state.
Christine Mehta is the associate editor of Ideas. She can be reached at christine.mehta@globe.com.