On Wednesday, masked Plain Cross immigration officers arrested Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish citizen on a student visa outside Tufts University, where he earned his PhD. The video of her arrest, showing her being filmed while walking down the street, is now viral. Ozturk is currently being held at the Louisiana Detention Center.
This comes after a series of similar actions by the federal government. Just two days ago, Yoon Zeo Chung, a 21-year-old Colombian student and green cardholder who had been living in the United States since she was seven, sued the Trump administration for arresting her and attempting to deport her.
The administration is targeting Chong and Ozturk for the same reasons that detained Mahmoud Khalil earlier this month: pro-Palestinian views and behaviorism.
Government actions pose a serious threat to freedom of speech. Trump administration officials explicitly told the free media that the cause of Halil's arrest was not that he committed a crime. “The allegations here are not that he was breaking the law,” an anonymous official said. “He mobilized support for Hamas and spread anti-Semitism in ways that go against US foreign policy.” (Halil was part of a pro-Palestinian protest at Columbia University when he was a graduate student last year.)
Ozturk, Chung, and Khalil are effectively targeted by their speech and behaviorism. This is an activity in which the administration is considered to be in line with Hamas in three cases.
These cases may be part of more extreme examples of the US government ignoring freedom of speech. But unfortunately, they are not unique.
There have been many other cases as law enforcement trampled on people's rights to protest and freedom of speech. In one particular case, a permanent Palestinian resident was also arrested and threatened to be deported.
The case ended with a fierce responsibilities by a judge. However, the incidents and developments since then show that the Trump administration has a long and shameful history of crackdowns on the First Amendment, particularly the pro-Palestinian speech.
There was a light in front of Halil
“When I heard about Mahmoud [Khalil]Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute, said:
In 1987, eight young immigrants (seven of them Palestinians) were arrested in Los Angeles and accused of supporting a popular front for the liberation of Palestine, which the US deemed a terrorist organization. They became known as Lights. Like Halil, the two arrested were permanent residents.
The FBI monitored the group for a while, monitoring those who participated in the protests, literature, and events. An informant sent to dinner reported that despite his lack of Arabic, it was clear that the dinner had been put on to raise funds for the terrorist attacks. Instead, the informants came to that conclusion only for the tone of their dinner music and speeches.
Ultimately, the FBI considered the group “anti-Israel” and “anti-raregan” and recommended that they be deported. This is not because they committed a crime. That's because the government was specifically targeting their speech and support for Palestinian rights, just as the Trump administration today targeted students who participated in the pro-Palestinian protests.
La Eight's case of staying in the US dragged on for 20 years. No one was deported, and some members became US citizens during that time. It went all the way to the Supreme Court, which sent the case back to the immigration court. And in 2007, the case was finally dismissed when the judge called the entire saga “embarrassment over the rule of law.”
How the War on Terrorism turned into a War on Civil Liberties
La Eight's story reflects the long-standing deep entrenchment of anti-Palestinian racism in US policies. But almost forty years after the US government began trying to deport them, the first revision was only more eroding, especially for Arab and Muslim Americans, as well as those who support the Palestinian cause.
His 2021 book The Reign of Fear: 9/11 How the ERA voluntarily destabilized America and created Trumpjournalist Spencer Ackermann documented that the American war on terrorism had neither peace nor victory, and instead laid the foundation for a brave state of surveillance that reduced the liberty of people's civil liberties.
The Patriot Act of 2001, which significantly expanded law enforcement surveillance, exacerbated racial profiling in the name of national security. Arabs, Muslims and South Asians were detained by the FBI and considered a threat to security. The no-fly list is disproportionately targeted Muslims. And law enforcement has begun surveillance and infiltrating Muslim communities across the United States.
“The 9/11 moment itself was a product of a long-standing trend, but what we see today is the achievement of all the truly rotten species that the government planted early on 9/11,” said Mohammad Tajal, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union in Southern California.
People's views and speeches were not the only targets. The law passed after 9/11 also undermined the First Amendment by invading American religious freedom. In 2009, the ACLU issued a comprehensive report documenting how post-9/11 reforms were violated, including infringing the rights of Muslim Americans to practice religion through charitable giving, in order to 'terrorist funding' laws.
For example, in 2001, the US government announced it was investigating more than 30 Muslim charities. By the end of that year, the government was forced to freeze assets of the three largest Muslim charities in the United States and shut them down.
A few years ago, the contrast between civil liberties and counter-terrorism balance was severe. When anti-government white supremacist Timothy McVay bombed federal buildings and killed 168 people in 1995, politicians and media reports denounced the bombing of Muslims until it was revealed that McVay was responsible.
McVay was eventually sentenced to death, but that was after the legal due process. Congress was not in a hurry to pass laws to crack down on white hegemony and domestic terrorism. Instead, it passed the law in 1996, making it easier for those suspected of having ties to foreign terrorist organizations.
“When terrorism was white — when its identity and purpose advocated the same legacy as a substantial amount of American racial caste, America sympathized with the principled objection to unleashing the nation's forced, punitive, and violent power,” writes Ackerman. “When terrorism was white, there was no chance of criminalizing a massive belt of Americans.”
It has been normalized since 9/11.
The expansion of security situation is at the expense of weakening the Bill of Rights. 2010, in Holder vs. humanitarian law projectthe Supreme Court opposed the Humanitarian Law Project, a nonprofit organization seeking to support the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka and the Kurdistan Workers' Party of Turkey.
The US government argued that even peaceful aid, such as conflict resolution, was equivalent to substantial support for terrorist organizations, and thus was not protected by the First Amendment. The court agreed.
“[It] We basically closed the First Amendment agenda to these important support laws, and proposed that, essentially, in some respects, constitutional rights can give way to the urgency of these national security,” Tajal said. But the whole picture was that the constitution was not intrusive of many of these government trends. ”
The legal philosophy that national security interests take precedence over individual freedoms is likely to be banking the Trump administration to deport students to participate in pro-Palestinian protests. Ultimately, that is what the Supreme Court argued in 1954 when it held that it could be deported for its ties with the Communist Party.
Ultimately, La Eight, Khalil, Chung, and Ozturk are the clear victims of very deep anti-Palestinian racism that urges the government to infringe on people's constitutionally protected speeches. But they are also a case of freedom of speech that has broader meaning to the rights of all Americans.
“This is a question. Are we a free country?” Berry said. “Do we respect freedom?”
