When Anti-Israel Legal Resident Protesters Are Rounded Up for their Speech, All Americans Suffer
The Donald Trump administration has ramped up its deportation efforts in the last couple of months, and as a result, some residents who are legally living in the United States are being targeted as well. The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been going after students protesting the American support for the Israeli government’s mistreatment of Palestinians. American taxpayers not only have to subsidize the Benjamin Netanyahu regime and its genocide in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, but they are forced to fund the rounding up of residents who are expressing themselves in constitutionally-protected activities (protests).
The First Amendment is threatened when the content of one’s speech is under scrutiny and the people are not permitted to freely express views that run contrary to the narrative. In this case, people are not permitted to criticize the secular nation of Israel and its actions, but in the past, liberals and progressives cheered on the censorship performed by the Joe Biden administration against those who posted online about the COVID-19 pandemic (institutions from the federal and state governments to academia to the medical and science communities labelled the unbelievers as spreaders of “misinformation” and eliminated their posts in a systematic censorship operation in conjunction with social media platforms).
Even if you despise the Palestinian people and find the college campus protests despicable, ultimately it does not matter when it comes to free speech. You cannot just simply say, without evidence, that these protesters are supporting Hamas, harassing Jewish students, and threatening the national security or American foreign policy because you do not like what they are saying. If you believe that a specific crime has occurred, go through the proper channels of due process and prove their crimes in the court of law. If you cannot charge these individuals with a crime, you are, indeed, targeting people based on their political views. This is not acceptable in the United States. The Fifth and Sixth Amendments (and legal precedent dating all the way back to the Magna Carta of 1215) are clear that people (not just citizens) cannot be imprisoned or swept away without a trial in front of their peers. The First Amendment highlights the natural right (from God) of all people (again, not just citizens) to speak their minds or protest on any topic of their choice. Even if you threaten to lock people up for speaking out against Israel, it causes a chilling effect where legal residents and citizens are afraid to exercise their right to free speech.
As mentioned last week when showing that American politicians are more concerned for the interests of Israel than those of American citizens, Mahmoud Khalil, who was a Columbia University graduate student and green card holder with permanent residency in the United States (legal resident), was arrested by agents in plain clothes (not easily marked as police) at his apartment in New York City, briefly detained in New Jersey, and transported in the dead of night many miles away to the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena. United States District Court for the Southern District of New York Judge Jesse Furman ordered his hearing to take place in a federal court in New Jersey, but the Trump administration ignored the order, claiming that there were bedbugs in the New Jersey facility, and forced him away to Louisiana for a deportation hearing.
Of course, Khalil was not charged with any crimes, and the only remarks on this from the Trump administration was that the student, who was of Palestinian origin but raised in Syria and married to an American woman, “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” and harmed American foreign policy under the Immigration and Nationality Act. There was no mention of the specifics of what crime he committed or how he damaged foreign policy, but as I explained last week, pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses embarrass our precious and sensitive “ally” of Israel (and hey, do not worry that the Israeli military murdered 34 Americans in 1967 by sinking the USS Liberty in an effort to either blame Egypt and drag the United States into the Six-Day War or to ensure that there was no intelligence sharing between those two nations, and because the greatest of allies sometimes betray you, you just need to overlook it). Since American politicians are bought and paid for, and no official charges have been brought forward against Khalil, it is reasonable to conclude that the Trump administration is simply doing Israel’s bidding and banning free speech on behalf of a foreign government (if true, this is high treason against the American people). Though we cannot prove this conclusively, we can put the puzzle pieces together.
This is far from the only case where the Trump administration has violated the First, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment rights to free speech, due process, and a fair trial in order to save face for Israel. Rumeysa Ozturk, who was on a Tufts University graduate-student visa from Turkey (or Türkiye, since the country no longer wants to be associated with a fowl eaten on Thanksgiving), was minding her own business and walking on the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts (near Boston) when she was abducted by ICE agents who were not wearing uniforms and had masks covering their faces (making identification difficult). They dragged her into an unmarked vehicle, like something that you would see in a movie involving shady covert operatives or members of a criminal organization, and transported her to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile (what is going on with potential concentration camps in that state?). Yup, this is what the United States has become: a land where people can be secretly stolen off of the streets and transported to a prison hundreds of miles away because the government does not like their speech (perhaps many of our founding fathers would have had something to say about this).
Just like in the Khalil case, Ozturk has not been charged with any crimes, and the only evidence of anything that can be found is that she co-authored an opinion piece last year that asked her university to recognize the Israeli genocide against Palestinians and to shy away from investments in companies that do business with Israel. Again, without evidence, she was claimed to have been “engaged in activities in support of Hamas,” and as of the time of this writing, she remains detained without a trial, and initially without the ability to speak to a lawyer (a habeas corpus petition has been filed, and although Massachusetts District Judge Indira Talwani ordered for her to remain in Massachusetts, we will see what comes next for Trump’s defiance and her detention in Louisiana). This is sick in the supposed land of the free, but liberals and progressives who are appalled by this should not be, as they cheered on the censorship of information under the Biden administration and the hunting down and arresting of January 6th protesters and whistleblowers who revealed information about our precious institutions (such as Edward Snowden, Jack Teixeira, Julian Assange, and Bradley/Chelsea Manning).
These two examples are the most prominent cases, but in all, the Trump administration, which has canceled 300 student visas so far, has arrested twenty other visa-holding students who were held, without evidence of a crime, for being in support of Hamas. In fact, a Gambian student at Cornell University (Ithaca, New York), an Indian scholar at Georgetown University (Washington, District of Columbia), a Lebanese doctor at Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island), and a Korean student at Columbia University (New York City) were all detained and had their visas revoked simply because they attended pro-Palestinian rallies. Although Secretary of State Marco Rubio has not found any crimes for these protesters, his reasoning is: “If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student, and you tell us that the reason why you’re coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds, but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we’re not going to give you a visa.” Well, then, Mr. Rubio, what violent crimes have these people committed? Show us.
Although the federal government reserves the ability to revoke visas and prevent students from studying in the United States as guests, protests are constitutionally-protected activities, so there is no excuse to cancel someone’s papers simply because of the content of someone’s speech. You can believe all you want that the protests are despicable and that Palestinians, who are also Semites, are less than human, but you cannot take away the fundamental God-given right to speak your mind or to be protected from unjust detention without due process. If those individuals vandalized buildings or harassed students, by all means, prosecute them of crimes and put them in front of a jury; but if you cannot charge them because you have nothing to go on other than pretending that they are violent because they protest for something that you do not like, you are no better than the fascists that have come before you.
You may say that this does not affect me because I am a citizen of the United States, and the federal government would never target Americans. Such a view would be naïve, as once the precedent begins by revoking legal residents’ status, what is to say that the current and future administrations will not go further? Maybe Donald Trump will stop at detaining illegal immigrants and visa holders, but what if a liberal or progressive president gets elected next and begins to round up those who do not wear masks during a pandemic, speak out about the origins of a manmade virus, or protest lockdown measures? If you can only see in the short term and do not have the ability to critically think about what this can mean for the future, you do a disservice to the country. Free speech and due process are fundamental principles that the United States needs to preserve over the generations, and to simply dismiss the revocations of visas for anti-Israel protests as no big deal is just begging the government to steal more of your rights down the road. Rights do not erode quickly, and they are gradually taken over the course of time.
As the Trump administration escalates the deportation efforts and increases the detention of illegal immigrants and legal residents in camps, protesters have taken to the streets to raise awareness of the living conditions for the roughly 600 inmates at Krome Detention Center near Miami, Florida. These supposed inhumane conditions include: overcrowding, lack of water and medical treatment, deprivation of legal counsel, people sleeping on cement floors, people left in shackles and chains and forced to urinate in their pants, and the smell of raw sewage throughout the facility. You can simply swallow your humanity and have no empathy for these people and chock it up to the fact that they may have come to the country illegally and should be shipped to inhuman prisons in El Salvador or elsewhere, but now with legal residents being rounded up and taken to facilities in Louisiana, what happens when the next step becomes arresting citizen dissidents to the federal government? Will you just remain silent and live your life obeying the state and being a good little sheep, or will you take a stand against tyranny and the theft of our rights? I will leave you with a quote that is often attributed to the French philosopher Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Thank you for reading, and please check out my book, The Global Bully, and website.