Are you an Alien Enemy?

The Kidnapping of Rumeysa Ozturk.

No one knows where Rumeysa Ozturk is. On Tuesday evening, Ozturk who is thirty years old and a doctoral student at Tufts University was surrounded by masked men who handcuffed her and took her away. In the words of the man whose cctv camera caught the incident “It looked like a kidnapping.” If you watch the video it does look like a kidnapping butin the dytopian universe we now inhabit it is a lawful one. Ozturk is in the United States on a student visa-and as has been seen in the past few weeks-being a visa holder in the United States now requires meek compliance with all the policies and orders of. the Trump Administration. Here is the video.

In Ozturk’s case, the offending material that has damned her to being carted off by masked men to an unknown immigration detention center,, was an op-ed she co-wrote in the Tufts Daily one year ago to the day. In the op-ed Ozturk expressed her dissatisfaction with the way the University Administration had dealt with the student protests against the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. Ozturk’s mistake is that she was ro-Palestinian. In this dreadful moment in American history, that political orientation is impermissible. Ozturk’s attorney has filed a suit in District Court where the judge has ordered that Ozturk not be taken out of the state of Massachusetts. Almost forty-eight hours since she was taken by ICE, Ozturk’s whereabouts are still unknown

A new hierarchy of discrimination has emerged under the Trump Administration and its gradations insure that most people will remain silent about what is happening. International students, for instance, are now an underclass as are any other lawful visa holders. The fact that permission to enter and stay in the United States is easily revocable is being used to target and then excise those who have made the terrible mistake of disagreeing with the Trump worldview. This theater of secrecy and sudden night time arrests has already prompted tens of thousands of people to scrub their social media to avoid any trouble. Ozturk, according to the people who know her, was not even very active in the protest movement beyond the op-ed-is a student of educational psychology-her big mistake was co-signing that op-ed, Unlike social media, it cannot be scrubbed and made to suit the Trump Administration’s narrow definition of permissibility.

Those who are not on visas are supposed to be thankful. The fact that the people being disappeared into the vast caverns of detention centers are visa holders or geen card holders and not citizens is supposed to create a sense of artificial safety and superiority among those that imagine themselves on a more solid legal footing. Thank God I am a citizen I have heard new immigrants say-and it is precisely what the Administration wants. To imagine oneself “safe” is a form of tacit approval for what is being done to those with fewer rights. Immigrants are equally to blame-because too many believe they have ‘earned” the safety because they are not from a Muslim country or they’re model minorities. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is simply divide and rule where immigrants are tempted into a fake sense of superiority based on their passport privilege.

Native born citizens, especially white ones make me cry even more. So many of my friends have “opted out” of paying attention to the daily dose of dread being dished out of the Trump Administration. If among minority communities there is anziety about the future-in white native born conversations there is dogged denial. In D.C where I am now, even the political class is unconcerned with these round-ups, resigned and/or oblivious to how these new distinctions are creating an underclass of forcibly silenced visa holders unqualified to exercise any kind of free speech.

In the meantime, The Alien Enemies Act of 1798, hangs like a sword of Damocles over everyone. In the past, the executive branch- President Trump rather has the power to designate someone an “alien enemy” That is what allowed over 200 alleged Venezuelans to be deported last week and it is what would allow anyone else to be similarly designated unless the United States Supreme Court steps in to delineate some limits. This court, I hate to remind you, has taken a very expansive view of Presidential powers in the past.

When the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 was invoked during world war II to put Japanese Americans into intternment camp, they put many Italian Americans in there too. When this story progresses and visa holders, then green card holders, then naturalized citizens then the native born are lined up it will become increasingly legally stigmatizing to have contact with anyone that might lead the Administration to suspect that you, despite your whiteness and native born-ness could be an Alien Enemy. Such is the new logic of political and social untouchability that is being put in place in this Republic of Dread.