The Grand Illusion
There’s been a great deal of furor and discussion about the case of Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil Kahlil, whom the Justice Department is trying to deport because he spoke out for the rights of Palestinians in Gaza. The Justice Department has so far been unable to find that Kahlil committed anything even resembling a crime, but the head of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, has declared that Kahlil should be deported because he spoke out, even though he is in the United States legally.
Then there’s the case Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly arrested and deported to a Salvadoran prison, again for no reason. Unlike Kahlil, Garcia not only did nothing illegal, but made no public statements, and was working as a sheet metal apprentice. And now, Trump’s DOJ is claiming that the President’s prerogatives as implementer of foreign policy outweigh civic protections stated in the Constitution and that Trump can effectively ignore those inconvenient rights.
Unhappily, the furor over those cases is overshadowing the far greater harm that the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security are creating with their handling of student visas. My wife the university professor has several foreign students studying voice and opera. Just because they’re on student visas, they’ve received notice that their visas may be revoked, as have all the other foreign students at the university.
This makes no sense. So far as anyone can tell, none of these students have been involved in even speaking out publicly, but they don’t know if they’ll be deported just because they’re on student visas. They don’t know whether, if they go home to spend the summer with their parents, they’ll be allowed to re-enter the United States to continue their studies. They’re all students who’ve complied fully with the law, yet the Justice Department is going after them, rather than concentrating on illegal immigrants and immigrants who’ve broken the law.
And, on a more practical level, foreign students pay the university more than in-state students, and they spend money to live here, which definitely helps the U.S. trade balance. There’s also the fact that by threatening deportation or actually deporting students who’ve done nothing wrong, the United States is undermining its own image as a land of laws and freedom.
This approach is likely illegal, at least according to the Constitution that the Trumpists are doing their best to ignore, not to mention both wrong-headed and counterproductive, and yet neither DOJ nor Homeland Security seems to see or understand that.
“This makes no sense.”
I’m afraid it does, actually. Are the people being targeted for deportation white, preferably of northern European origin, and Christian?
“This approach is likely illegal, at least according to the Constitution that the Trumpists are doing their best to ignore, not to mention both wrong-headed and counterproductive, and yet neither DOJ nor Homeland Security seems to see or understand that.”
The enforcement of Federal law falls to the executive branch. This particular administration is indeed pathetic at seeing and understanding, but they’re world-class at not caring.
@KevinJ white tourists from Germany, the UK and Canada have all been detained for weeks in very punitive deportation centers in the USA. Others have been refused entry at the border, over such small freedom of speech isdues as having said something unflattering about Trump or MAGA on social media. Though the main targets are clearly minorities, even very ‘majority-looking’ visitors are being detained for very small mistakes, or no discernible reason at all. The random creation of fear, the deliberate isolation of Americans from the rest of the world, and the pleasure of exercising power over people who cannot respond, seems to be the goal.
I have no doubt you are right.
While in no way funny it reminds me of the cheers episode where Norm became the messenger to tell people they were fired. He had a hard time of it and treated these people to a great day before he gave them the bad news. Soon the word was out that Norm did this and people became afraid of him. People became frightened of Norm. After a while Norm could no longer take it and called his boss to quit. The person heard Norm’s voice on the phone and the boss thought Norm was calling his boss to fire him. The boss panicked and ran away. Now if anyone disappears, anyone can say ICE got them. This is a very dangerous place.
Oh where to start? This administration has decided that they won’t do policy. Instead they are doing ‘fear’. The situation with students on visa, immigrants (legal or otherwise) is not one where Trump is simply instituting policy or a shift in policy, he is using fear itself as a cudgel to bend people to his will.
He’s doing the same with politicians in his party, with judges he doesn’t like or agree with, with institutions of education, with a vast swath of the government itself, and I suspect the general population next (or at least voters of any opposing party, if we even have more elections).
So, I think the ramifications of this administration’s actions are much broader than the question of some student’s residency status. Things are getting bad and I don’t see the Republican party bailing out this country under any circumstances – policy or economics or constitutional disagreements.
I agree.
And I worry that he intends to provoke unrest ahead of the midterms, as a pretext not to allow elections “at this time.”
A white citizen immigration attorney in Massachusetts just got a deportation threat from the DOJ! Maybe her gender played a part!
They come for us all.
While I agree with the final sentiment, that they will eventually come for everyone, this particular case is almost certainly pure incompetence and negligence.
Since most Trump picks were chosen for being sycopanths and are demonstrably incompetent; and appear to have been chosen specifically to destroy the departments they are leading, this is not reassuring. The reaction of Trump and his picks to these shows of incompetence and negligence is not to undo the wrongs they did, but to double down, blame the victim, maybe blame some underling; then create greater chaos elsewhere to destract from the last debacle.
As a glass-half-full person, I’m trying to see the upside of disrupting international trade and throwing the US and probably a lot of the world into a recession; in that that might, like the Covid epidemic, slightly slow down the speed at which we are hurtling towards irreversible climate catastrophes. But since all his relevant policies appear to be aimed at accellerating global warming that might cancel each other out.
For the rest there are only downsides, and very bad ones, for everybody but the billionaires. With both Congress and the Supreme Court in the pockets of the billionaires and libertarians, all three branches at the top level seem equally hellbent on creating a new feudal-style society where the oligarchs can rule unchecked and the rest of the people become powerless peons, who can be disappeared by being grabbed off the streets by masked men in unmarked vans, and renditioned for life to camps and torture prisons in foreign countries without any due process. It’s scary to see how fast this slide into fascistic authoritarianism is happening in the US, and probably even more scary for anyone living there who isn’t MAGA and has enough sense of history to see where this is going. I hope you can still turn this around, but am becoming rather doubtfull, seeing how spineless most of your Congress is showing themselves to be.