At about 5:15pm on Tuesday, the man in a black hoodie stopped a Tufts graduate student, Lu Mesaozturk, on the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts. She tried to pass by but he grabbed her. She cried, and it seemed that help had arrived.
However, the masked newcomer was actually there to help her assailant. They took off their Ozturk backpacks and seized their phones. The hooded man put her in handcuffs. “We are the police,” they told her.
“You don't look like that,” replied the obvious bystander. “Why are you hiding your face?”
Ozturk, a Turkish citizen on a student visa, is currently being held at the Immigration Customs Enforcement Processing Centre in Louisiana. The State Department has cancelled its Ozturk visa. Ice is preparing her to deport.
The Trump administration claims she is engaged in “prohama” activities, but has not provided any evidence of significant support to Palestinian extremists (or other terrorist groups). The closest thing everyone found is the 2024 manipulation of Tufts' Student Newspaper, where Ozturk and her co-authors criticize Israel's war in Gaza, but have not even expressed anything close to support for Hamas.
This nasty theory – Ozturk was purely punished for her political speech – received more support at a press conference Thursday afternoon. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said his agency had revoked Ozturk's visa because his agency was part of the pro-Palestinian movement that caused the “Racchus” on campus.
“We've given you a visa to come and study and earn your degree. We're going to avoid becoming a social activist who tears our university campus,” he said, but did not provide evidence that Ozturk did anything more destructive than writing an operation. He also suggested that he revoked visas for “more than 300” students like her for similar reasons.
This is a clear moment for American democracy. The unmarked unknown law enforcement agencies adducting legal immigrants appear to be retaliating for First Amendment protected speeches is an attack like an attack on civil liberty that does not hesitate to label them as authoritarians in other countries.
And that's just an example among many people.
Targeting at least seven other pro-Palestinian students, rendering of hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to Salvador prisons, expanding and physical abuse of legal immigrants at the border, all representing extraordinary abuse of federal government power, giving a limited legal attitude to citizenship status.
Thus, the long-standing fear of the US government's weaponization of its opponents is no longer a hypothesis. What's happening is the full-view application of federal immigration authority to authoritarian purposes. And things can get worse from here.
Immigration enforcement as an authoritarian gateway drug
On Wednesday night, Mother Jones released a story about how the Trump administration identified Venezuelans for deportation, showing just how dangerous the present moment is.
Reporters Noah Lanado and Isabela Diaz conducted extensive interviews with several male friends, family and community members sent to El Salvador. They found no evidence that these men were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, as the Trump administration argued. Rather, the reporter discovered that he was purely accused of having a tattoo.
Neri Alvarado Borges, a Venezuelan bakery who lived in the Dallas area, is one example.
No one who knew him believed he had a connection to Tren de Aragua. However, they noted that he had a big ribbon tattoo – a homage to his brother, 15-year-old Nerison, with autism. According to Borges, the tattoo and two others were the only reason for his detention.
“Well, you're here for your tattoo,” the ice agent told Borges, according to a report by Mother Jones. “We find and ask everybody who has tattoos.”
This is an absurd policy as a law enforcement issue. Experts at Tren de Aragua do not believe there is a common, reliable way to identify gang members using tattoos. This has been demonstrated by other reports of ice errors, such as sending professional footballers to Salvador prisons, as his lawyers say about his Real Madrid ink.
But as an attempt to assert power, it makes sense. The government, like Venezuelan immigrants and Palestinian activists, identifies groups they want to suppress, and uses the threat of abortion and physical harm to control or silence them. It is classic authoritarian politics. Use law enforcement to punish individuals who belong to the wrong group or who have the wrong idea.
It's easy to see why non-citizens are now at their worst. They do not enjoy the rights under the American legal system, making it much easier to be exposed to the cruelest things of the brute force.
But as Trump's treatment of universities and federal officials shows, he is keen to wield arbitrary powers against citizens as well. And there is good reason to believe that the version of tactics used in immigration today may one day be directed towards citizens. It is at least a long-standing appeal to the Trump team's “moderation” and a process of stripping citizenship from naturalized Americans.
His 2021 book Immigration and freedompolitical theorist Chandran Kukasas argues that by his nature, immigration enforcement involves restrictions on citizens' rights. The very act of trying to distinguish between citizens and non-citizens in order to deport or provide benefits requires an increase in the level of surveillance and surveillance of everyone living in the country. How else does the government distinguish between those they intend to target and those who are not?
Kukathas writes generally about the immigration enforcement system. Even the most intended points out that there is a need for some kind of limitation at will. But what if you try to arbitrarily go through the powers created by immigration enforcement, designed to suppress critics and sow fear?
Now, you get a statement like this from White House aide Stephen Miller: “Dear Marxist Judge: If an illegal alien criminal breaks into our country, the only “process” he can be given rights is deportation. ”
The mirror here doesn't just express a light emptying for the idea of a “die process.” He expresses a light emptying to the idea that there should be a legal check on their ability to identify who is deported. There is a legitimate process because law enforcement cannot be trusted when chasing the “right” target. Free societies rely on surveillance and restrictions on police power. Otherwise, freedom is simply a paper word that corresponds to the whims of a gun-holder.
In expressing such unauthorized hostility to this idea, Miller showed us a disturbing link between administration attacks on immigrants, American citizen repression, and light empt to legal surveillance.
They behave as if they have the right to chase the person they want. For some reason, in any way they want, and whoever tries to stop them, is dishonest at best, and at worst a terrorist empath.
We've seen this kind of politics before. And the track record is tough.
