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Paging Martin Niemöller
An alarming sign of where America is headed.
An alarming acceleration of Donald Trump’s authoritarian takeover of the United States took place this week when ICE agents went into the home of a legal permanent resident and arrested him simply because Trump and his followers do not like his political views.
That man, you probably know by now, is named Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, who was one of the leaders of the student protests at that university over the war in Gaza. The administration most certainly chose him because it believes he is an individual few Americans would rise up to defend, part of a small and very vulnerable minority (see also: trans people), and one who is easily demonized for much of the general public, even if it requires a wantonly dishonest distortion of (if not outright lies about) his views and activities. But that is how the descent into autocracy traditionally begins.
Khalil — who was born in a refugee camp in Syria and is a citizen of Algeria — quickly vanished into the archipelago of ICE detention centers, with his family and lawyer initially unaware of his location and unable to contact him. First thought to be in a jail in New Jersey, he turned out be in one of the government’s most remote and inaccessible facilities, in rural Louisiana, where he now faces deportation on specious grounds that bode ill for us all. What is happening to him is a terrifying precedent and a terrible omen of where the Trump administration is headed, and what it intends to do going forward.
Trial and Error
For the rest of this blog, I feel like I could just repost Adam Serwer’s excellent piece about the case in The Atlantic. But since I’m told by some sticklers that that is not journalistically ethical, I will confine myself to merely quoting big chunks of it. (Happy now, hairsplitters?)
Serwer’s piece described Khalil’s detention as a “trial run,” noting that he was arrested without due process simply for exercising his Constitutional right to free speech. The administration’s feeble efforts to gin up a more defensible pretext are deeply alarming in themselves, as they indicate that Trump & Co. intend to criminalize political views they don’t like and dissent full stop.
