Who Will Speak Out?

         Of all the chaos roiling this country over the last two months, nothing has troubled me more than the arrest and imprisonment, without warrants or charges, of a growing number of documented foreign students.

         Late last Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told NBC News that the Trump Administration had revoked 300 or more student visas. “We do it every day,” he said.

         His comment came a day after a 30-year-old Turkish-born doctoral candidate at Tufts University, Rumeysa Ozturk, was plucked off a Somerville, Mass., street in daylight by a half-dozen masked federal agents. They grabbed her phone, handcuffed her, pushed her into an unmarked car and drove away.  A neighbor filmed her abduction, footage that has ricocheted around the internet. Less well known is that she suffered an asthma attack as she was flown to a holding facility in Louisiana or that her lawyer had no idea where to find her for 24 hours. She is still being held.

      Ozturk had voiced support for the pro-Palestinian movement at Tufts, but was not known as a prominent leader.  She also apparently wrote an opinion piece published in the student newspaper that called on the school to divest its holdings in Israel. That’s it. As a headline in The Intercept put it, “In Trump’s America, You Can Be Disappeared for Writing an Op-ed.”

      Though Tufts students gathered to protest, the response of their university and the higher-education community in Boston seemed strangely muted. Tufts did not cancel classes or call for a daylong teach-in on First Amendment rights. Instead of denouncing the arrest in a strong statement, Tufts President Sunil Kumar offered a careful message of solace to students, suggesting the event might be distressing to “some members” of the Tufts community, “particularly members of the international community.” 

      Instead of furiously denouncing the action in fiery speeches in front of the Capitol, congressional Democrats kept their energy focused on budget battles and the continuing saga of the Signal chat leak. Two to three days after the incident significant stories surfaced in The New York Times and on NPR and CNN. But the coverage has not been sustained.

      To me, this all feels a bit surreal. How in the United States of America have we come to accept people—and in this case a Fulbright Scholar—being snatched from the street in broad daylight and shipped off to prisons with no due process? How have we as Americans become so insensitive to and dismissive of immigrants when everyone living here other than indigenous people are themselves descended from immigrants, many escaping repression in their countries of origin.

      Should politicians perhaps stop polling whether the immigration issue is popular politically and start standing instead for moral clarity and decency?

      My own father came to this country in early 1937 through Ellis Island. Jewish by birth though not faith, he’d escaped Germany by hiking into Czechoslovakia with enough money in his shoes to get a start in the United States. He was one of the lucky ones; an uncle already here sponsored him. And he gave back by enlisting and serving as a U.S. Army master sergeant in propaganda during the last two years of World War II in Europe.

      Odds are I wouldn’t be here today to write this piece had he been shipped back to Berlin. Late Thursday night, The Boston Globe reported that a fully documented Russian scientist, Kenija Petrova, who works at the Harvard Medical School, has been held in detention for six weeks. She was picked up on her return from a vacation in France because she didn’t declare frog embryo samples, which she was bringing back to her lab. They were found in her suitcase.

      This minor infraction typically results in a $500 fine. Petrova, who before coming to the United States was arrested in Russia for protesting against the Ukraine war, today is also being held in Louisiana. She could be deported back to Russia. What fate would await her there?

      Donald Trump’s second term in office officially started with a muscle-flexing promise to sweep lawbreaking undocumented immigrants out of the country. His policies already have crossed multiple lines, targeting hard-working undocumented families, national groups of immigrants here with various forms of temporary immigration status and now fully documented visitors, living and working here.

      ICE’s actions have driven working families into the shadows of their homes and so frightened their children that some have stopped going to school. They have morphed into midnight plane rides from U.S. cities to brutal El Salvadorian jails and daylight arrests of fully documented professionals.

      Late at night, I can’t lose the nagging feeling that exercising our First Amendment rights of freedom of speech may soon become cause enough to arrest citizens as well. It’s presumably precisely the kind of fear that Donald Trump wants to elicit. And it leaves me with this question.

      If we don’t rise up and speak out now, will anyone be left to speak out later?

Jerry Lanson coaches writing part-time at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is a professor emeritus from Emerson College and a former newspaper reporter, editor and columnist. He writes a Substack titled From the Grass Roots, which can be found at https://jerrylanson@substack.com.