Protestors are being detained and potentially deported. How bad can it get?
A political activist sits in an ICE detention facility while the president ramps up his authoritarian rhetoric and policies.
The Trump administration’s crackdown on dissent has started in earnest. Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate and lead negotiator for the pro-Palestinian protests last spring, was arrested by ICE agents earlier this week under the guise of national security. Khalil has not been charged with a specific crime—rather, he is being held and threatened with deportation under an obscure immigration law that allows the government to deport anyone deemed a threat to United States foreign policy. Khalil has been detained despite having no formal criminal charges against him and in spite of his valid green card. His wife—eight months pregnant—may very well give birth while he sits in a Louisiana jail cell, a deeply chilling prospect with sweeping consequences for freedom of speech in America.
Trump, no stranger to grand pronouncements, stated that Khalil’s detention will be the first “of many to come.” Indeed, another Columbia student was nearly arrested by ICE before fleeing to Canada. The administration’s targeting of international student protestors is almost certainly a prelude to a broader crackdown, one that will circumvent the civil rights of protestors and other dissidents. In fact, Pam Bondi, the attorney general, has threatened to investigate Tesla protestors, highlighting the administration’s authoritarianism alongside its cynical cronyism. Pro-Palestinian activism will not be the only protest movement Trump tries to muzzle.
Concurrently, Trump gave a belligerent speech at the Department of Justice where he vituperated his adversaries, labeling them “scum”—language that echoes Nazi rhetoric—and calling for their imprisonment. Trump’s list of enemies is long, and it includes everyone from run-of-the-mill political opponents to the prosecutors who sought to hold him accountable for January 6. His desire to exact vengeance seems infinite and, with pliant leadership at the Justice Department, imminent.
Khalil’s detention effectively amounts to the government imprisoning a legal resident for his constitutionally-protected speech, an obvious affront to the First Amendment. Like in a tinpot dictatorship, Trump’s cronies at the Department of Homeland Security are arresting the regime’s political opponents, and the DoJ is gearing up to investigate others. First they came for pro-Palestinian protestors; then they’ll come for Trump’s chief antagonists. Who will come next?
This crackdown is all the more alarming considering the president’s imperial machinations. From an invasion of Mexico to the annexation of Greenland or Canada, Trump’s foreign policy plans are decidedly violent and misaligned with the desires of the American people. What happens when protests break out in response to an unprecedented action from the Trump White House? What will become of protestors who take to the streets to voice their discontent? Will they be viewed as threats to American foreign policy, just as Khalil has been? The potential for serious First Amendment violations is immense. Protestors in prisons; organizers investigated; everyday citizens threatened into submission. Trump’s America will give no quarter to resistance, and the suppression of pro-Palestinian voices is nothing less than the realization of a Trumpian police state.