[[link removed]]

UNMARKED VANS. SECRET LISTS. PUBLIC DENUNCIATIONS. OUR POLICE STATE
HAS ARRIVED.  
[[link removed]]


 

M. Gessen
April 2, 2025
New York Times
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed].]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The citizens of such a state live with a feeling of being
constantly watched. They live with a sense of random danger. Anyone
can be a plainclothes agent or a self-appointed enforcer. _

, Mike Osborne for The New York Times

 

“It’s the unmarked cars,” a friend who grew up under an
Argentine dictatorship said. He had watched the video
[[link removed]] of the Columbia
graduate student Mahmoud Khalil’s abduction. In the video, which
Khalil’s wife recorded, she asks for the names of the men in
plainclothes who handcuffed her husband.

“We don’t give our name,” one responds. “Can you please
specify what agency is taking him?” she pleads. No response. We know
now that Khalil was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement,
an agency of the Department of Homeland Security.

Those of us who have lived in countries terrorized by a secret police
force can’t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity. “I never
realized until this moment how much fear I carried with me from my
childhood in Communist Romania,” another friend, the literary
scholar Marianne Hirsch, told me. “Arrests were arbitrary and every
time the doorbell rang, I started to shiver.”

It’s the catastrophic interruption of daily life, as when a Tufts
University graduate student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was grabbed
[[link removed]] on
a suburban street by half a dozen plainclothes agents, most of them
masked. The security camera video of that arrest shows Ozturk walking,
looking at her phone, perhaps to check the address where she was
supposed to meet her friends for dinner that night, when an agent
appears in front of her. She says something — asks something —
struggling to control her voice, and within seconds she is handcuffed
and placed in an unmarked car.

It’s the forced mass transports of immigrants. These are not even
deportations, in the way we typically think of them. Rather than being
sent to their country of origin, Venezuelans
[[link removed]] were
sent to El Salvador, where they are being imprisoned, indefinitely,
without due process. It’s the sight of men being marched in
formation, their heads shaved, hundreds of people yanked from their
individual lives to be reduced to an undifferentiated mass. It’s the
sight, days later, of the secretary of homeland security posing
against the background of men in cages and threatening more people
with the same punishment.

It’s the growing irrelevance of the law and the helplessness of
judges and lawyers. A federal judge ordered flights carrying the
Venezuelan men to be turned around and demanded information about the
abductees. Another federal judge forbade the government to deport,
without notice, Rasha Alawieh, the Brown University medical school
professor who was detained on return from a trip to Lebanon. Another
judge prohibited moving Rumeysa Ozturk from Massachusetts without
notice. The executive branch apparently ignored these rulings.

It’s the chilling stories that come by word of mouth. ICE is
checking documents on the subway. ICE is outside New York public
libraries that hold English-as-a-second-language classes. ICE agents
handcuffed a U.S. citizen who tried to intervene in a detention in
Harlem. ICE vehicles are parked outside Columbia. ICE is coming to
your workplace, your street, your building. ICE agents are wearing
brown uniforms that resemble those of UPS — don’t open the door
for deliveries. Don’t leave the house. The streets in the New York
neighborhoods with the highest immigrant populations have emptied out.

It’s the invisible hand of the authorities. The media outlet
Zeteo reports
[[link removed]] that
Homeland Security employees are revoking foreign students’ status in
the database that’s usually maintained by universities. (Normally,
once a person has entered the country on a valid academic visa, they
have the right to stay as long as they remain in the program for which
the visa was granted — this is what university administrators
track.) These changes have reportedly been made with no notification
and in the absence of any transparent process. Of course, the
Department of Homeland Security, when it was created in the wake of
9/11, was meant to function in opaque ways and with broad authority;
it was designed
[[link removed]] to
be a secret-police force. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has bragged
to reporters about revoking the legal status of upward of 300 people
and promised there would be more: “We’re looking every day for
these lunatics.”

It’s the shifting goal posts. They are taking not only people who
are in the United States without legal status but also those who are
here on a visitor’s visa and then also legal permanent residents.
They are targeting not only people who have criminal convictions but
also those whom they say they suspect of belonging to a gang and also
those who participated in or supported campus protests and then also
someone, like Ozturk, who merely wrote, with three other people, an
opinion essay in a student newspaper.

And then there was a German green card holder at Boston’s Logan
Airport who was allegedly
[[link removed]] stripped
and deprived of sleep and his medications by Customs and Border
Protection — actions that could fit the legal definition of torture.
(The agency has denied the allegations.) And a Canadian with a job
offer who was detained at the southern border and held for 12 days.
And another German, a tourist, who was detained at the southern border
and held for more than six weeks. And a Russian biomedical researcher
at Harvard who was detained coming back from France and has been in
the infamous detention facility in Louisiana for over a month.

It’s the way we dig down for the details of these stories to
reassure ourselves that this won’t happen to us, or that there is
some logic to these arrests. The German man had a misdemeanor charge a
decade ago. The Canadian was possibly using a crossing not meant for
people submitting work visa applications. The other German, a tattoo
artist, was carrying her equipment
[[link removed]] and
customs agents might have suspected that she was planning to work
illegally. The Russian scientist was bringing in frog embryos that the
Department of Homeland Security says she did not declare properly.
When the range of factors that can get a person arrested stretches
from political speech to a paperwork error, we are in territory
described by the Russian saying, “Give us a person and we’ll find
the infraction.”

And, as the historian Timothy Snyder has pointed out
[[link removed]],
if due process is routinely denied to noncitizens, it will be denied
to citizens too, simply because it is often impossible for people to
prove that they are citizens. This has happened before, when an
unknown number of U.S. citizens were caught up in the deportations of
hundreds of thousands of Mexican Americans in the late 1920s and
1930s.

It’s the lists. More than anything else, in fact, it’s the lists.
A private company has launched an app called ICERAID, billed as a
“protocol that delegates intelligence-gathering tasks to citizens
that would otherwise be undertaken by law enforcement agencies.” The
app promises rewards for “capturing and uploading images of criminal
illegal alien activity” and possibly even bigger rewards for
self-reporting — for adding oneself to the ICERAID registry if one
is “an honest, hard-working undocumented immigrant with no criminal
history.” The app, in other words, combines two time-tested
secret-police techniques: incentivizing some people to denounce their
neighbors and inducing others to add themselves to registries.

It’s the denunciations by concerned citizens. Before there was
ICERAID, there were several groups compiling lists of people they
consider antisemitic, especially university students and faculty.
These organizations include Mothers Against College Antisemitism, a
Facebook group with more than 60,000 members; Betar U.S., a Zionist
organization so extreme-right that the Anti-Defamation League has
denounced it; and several other groups
[[link removed]] that,
since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, have been
reporting people to government authorities and cheering when they are
detained, deported or fired. When Rubio was asked
[[link removed]] if
the State Department is using lists fed to it by these private groups,
he said, “We’re not going to talk about the process by which
we’re identifying it because obviously we’re looking for more
people.”

THE STATE APPEARS TO HAVE OUTSOURCED SURVEILLANCE. A Columbia
professor shared an Instagram story by the Chinese dissident artist Ai
Weiwei that showed Elon Musk’s “X” symbol rotating and morphing
into a swastika. The professor did it on personal time, from a
personal residence, to a personal account. An Instagram story lives
only for 24 hours; someone was watching. It was reported to the
university; three months passed before the professor was cleared. Then
the professor’s name and picture, along with a new inventory of
ostensible offenses, popped up on one of those lists of supposedly
antisemitic faculty members. There was, of course, nothing antisemitic
about the Instagram story or the rest of it. The professor, like so
many of the people on these lists, is Jewish.

Last Friday, mere minutes after Columbia announced the name of its new
interim president, Claire Shipman, an entity that calls itself
Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus addressed
[[link removed]] Shipman
on X: “We have identified faculty members” who, the group
believes, should be purged. The self-appointed enforcers are vigilant.
This, too, is a hallmark of a secret-police state.

The citizens of such a state live with a feeling of being constantly
watched. They live with a sense of random danger. Anyone — a
passer-by, the man behind you in line at the deli, the woman who lives
down the hall, your building’s super, your own student, your
child’s teacher — can be a plainclothes agent or a self-appointed
enforcer. People live in growing isolation and with the feeling of
low-level dread, and these are the defining conditions of living in a
secret-police state. People lose the ability to plan for the future,
because they feel that they have no control over their lives, and they
try to make themselves invisible. They move through the world without
looking, for fear of seeing too much.

But while we are still capable of looking, we have to say what we see:
The United States has become a secret-police state. Trust me, I’ve
seen it before.

_M. Gessen is an Opinion columnist for The Times. They won a George
Polk award for opinion writing in 2024. They are the author of 11
books, including "The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed
Russia," which won the National Book Award in 2017._

 

* US Immigration and Customs Enforcement; Student Deportations; US
Universities;
[[link removed]]
* police state
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed].]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]