The protests that erupted across Los Angeles in response to the Trump administrations draconian immigration policies did not come as a surprise. After all, Trump’s policies were designed in part to stoke terror and fury. It was surprising, though, that the President chose to deploy seven hundred marine officers and 4,000 National Guard soldiers in response to the protests. Not because it was out of step with Trump’s character — authoritarian flourishes are one of the President’s specialities — but because the sight of uniformed soldiers and marines rolling into downtown LA in armored military vehicles is supposed to be shocking. Shock and terror are the objective. Trump wants us to be afraid.
This most recent spectacle is one in a long list of tactics undertaken by the President since the start of his second term. To name another, several months ago the administration began rounding up suspected illegal immigrations and shipping them to El Salvador on the basis of vacuous national security arguments. One of these plaintiffs was J.G.G. a Venezuelan tattoo artist who claimed asylum in the United States because he feared the Venezuelan police would beat, torture, and kill him. J.G.G. has two tattoos, one of a rose and a skull and another of an eye with a clock inside it. The American immigration officer interviewing him incorrectly concluded that these tattoos linked the asylum seeker with the Venezuelan gang Tren De Aragua. It is astonishing how many experts on Tren De Aragua suddenly appeared in the United States — each one eager to rant on the gang’s dangers and global reach.
J.G.G. thus became the plaintiff in the class action case J.G.G. v Trump which challenged President Donald Trump’s authority to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador without due process. It was one of the first splashy battles early in the second Trump administration between the Trump admin and American defenders of civil liberties. The ACLU filed the case while J.G.G. was being held in Texas for fear that his deportation was imminent. It was. Despite a verbal order by Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court to halt deportation proceedings, the Department of Justice proceeded with them. Since then, Boasberg has launched an investigation into the President’s flouting of a judge’s order. For their part, the Trump Administration has refused to provide the information regarding whether the Administration ordered the planes to depart in contravention of the Judge’s order by invoking the State Secrets Act.
The complaint filed in court notes that during the three other instances when the Alien Enemies Act has been invoked the country has been at war. Trump foresaw this challenge to his invocation, and to overcome it his administration has argued that the gang Tren De Aragua is a terrorist group which is “invading” the United States. It’s a strategy that Trump himself has been preparing for a long time — it even has a nickname: Trump and his supporters call it “Operation Aurora,” referring to Aurora, Colorado where Trump debuted the strategy. He told a packed campaign rally last November that America was being invaded by Tren De Aragua and that when he became President, he would kick out all the invaders. As a historical matter, of course, this is nonsense, no matter the number of the gang’s members within our borders now. We are not being “invaded,” even if illegal immigration is a problem. But exaggeration and hyperbole have always been Trump’s most effective rhetorical devices and the image of a swarm of Black and Brown criminals is just the image that feeds the MAGA base.
When the U.S. Supreme Court took up the matter at the end of March, it did what it usually does — it did not decide the matter of whether the Alien Enemies Act was correctly invoked against those believed to be members of Tren De Aragua. Instead, it said that the matter should never have been heard in Judge Boasberg’s court at all. More specifically, it said that the correct petitions that should have been filed by J.G.G and others similarly situated would have been a habeas corpus petition. That habeas petition it further ruled should have been filed in Texas where J.G.G had been detained and should therefore be refiled in that jurisdiction.
J.G.G. is a single battle in a multi-front war. At around the same time as the ACLU was working on the J.G.G. case, a judge in a courtroom in New Jersey was considering whether Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder, should be deported because of his participation in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University where Khalil was a graduate student. Khalil was apprehended in his home by plain-clothed ICE agents, his green card was revoked, and he was placed in detention. Despite the fact that our judicial system considers that the Bill of Rights applies to all people on United States territory, Khalil’s speech is considered “against the policy of the Trump Administration.” This, the Administration lawyers argue, is reason enough to revoke his green card and send him back to Algeria. In the meantime, Khalil has had to miss the birth of his son while in federal custody. The administration has been able to hold Khalil for months and threaten impending deportation despite the fact that they provided no evidence for the claim that Khalil was taking orders from Hamas. Nor has Khalil been charged with any terror related crime. This administration does not require evidence in order to strip people of their First Amendment freedoms. No matter how many times one hears this said, it never fails to shock. It is not a reality to which we should learn to acclimate ourselves but that sort of desensitization is precisely the what the Trump Administration would like.
These two cases – and there are innumerable others — make clear that the Trump Administration is attempting something very ambitious: the overthrow of the American conception of freedom of speech and movement. In America today the government has the power to declare any kind of speech or any kind of person intolerable. If that speech comes from an immigrant, their citizenship can be taken away through denaturalization; if it comes from a visa holder their visa can be revoked: together these two categories represent tens of millions of people living in the United States under the shadow of reprisals and targeting by the Trump Administration. The Constitution is an afterthought when it is a thought at all and parallels are being suggesting its rights and liberties apply only to natural born citizens while all others represent a lower, rights-less class of persons. And the list of undesirables is not limited to Venezuelans or pro-Palestinians. Immigration officials at airports and other border patrol officials are under tremendous pressure to enforce visa revocations and deportations. Indian television has been broadcasting warning reports of elderly Indians who, upon their return to the United States, are pressured to sign what’s known — or more to the point, too little known — as a I-407 form, which essentially strips them of their green cards. Once signed, there is no way one can recover the status of legal permanent residency.
These odious plans have found an ally in the new technology which is being harnessed to do the bidding of the new fascist immigration regime. Border officials are now using artificial intelligence to scan the social media accounts of people arriving at the border to see if they have made any statements against the Trump Administration or in support of the enemies of the United States. The United States Customs and Immigration Service is demanding applicants to provide their social media handles on all immigration and visa forms so as to accelerate the surveillance of speech. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio has belligerently reminded everyone: no one except a US citizen has the right to enter the United States and so the Administration is free to deny entry based on whether or not a potential visitor supports Donald Trump. If you read that true sentence again, you will be struck by the full magnitude of its grotesqueness. It is, to borrow the term that nativists love to use, un-American and nothing less. Why would a country want to strip itself of its own glory? But a Lebanese transplant surgeon from Brown University had her visa revoked because of anti-Trump statements, as if the country and the world is not teeming with such statements, and a French scientist was refused entry at the border because he had criticized the Trump Administration funding cuts for scientific research. Banned for criticism, which is precisely what the American system was created for.
All of these efforts have stimulated a “great silencing” of the American public sphere and beyond. The fear that is causing many Americans to inhibit their pronouncements is even greater beyond America’s borders, where America is no longer the coveted second act for people seeking freedom and opportunity. The repressive weather that pervades the MAGA-verse is leeching out from the White House to the farthest corners of the earth. Any person anywhere in the world who hoped to study or work in the United States has to self- censor or re-conceive her future. If Trump’s intention was to take a wrecking ball to the American Dream, he has succeeded in record time. He is ushering in a new era, one in which rights and freedoms are accorded only to the minority of Americans who share his strange and nasty views. The American Dream, after all, was never just an American dream.