From the moment Trump took office he was committed to going after Palestinian protesters. I guess it’s just because they were supported by left wing students? That seems like a stretch even for them and I wonder if there was more to it. A special favor for Bibi perhaps? Who knows?
Anyway, they went full STASI on this, right out of the gate:
When Rumeysa Ozturk was grabbed by masked federal agents outside her Massachusetts home in March, the video of the Turkish graduate student being handcuffed and hustled into an unmarked vehicle spread around the world.
A federal trial that ended Tuesday revealed for the first time the story behind the images, showing how the government assigned a special team to target Ozturk and other pro-Palestinian activists, laying the groundwork for their highly unusual arrests.
Ozturk had committed no crime, yet her detention was a priority for the new Trump administration.
[…]
On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge William Young in Boston ruled that the push to target Ozturk and other students was blatantly unconstitutional. The White House vowed to appeal the decision.
The bench trial — decided by a judge rather than a jury — generated thousands of pages of depositions, court transcripts and filings that provided a detailed picture of the machinery that led to the arrests.
Among the findings: White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, a top ally of President Donald Trump and architect of his mass deportation campaign, spoke with senior officials at the State Department and DHS more than a dozen times in March to discuss student visa revocations.
Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that investigates transnational crime, took the lead. HSI researched the protesters and referred dozens of cases to the State Department, sometimes citing an obscure statute for revoking visas. Then it carried out the arrests.
[…]
While Trump administration officials have repeatedly accused the students of being “terrorist sympathizers” and “Hamas supporters,” no evidence of any connection to violence or terrorism was presented at trial.
That video of Ozturk still makes my blood run cold. It was the first of many but it’s still emblematic of the terror these people are inflicting on our streets. And anyone who thinks their citizenship will protect them from these people is living in a dream world. This is just their opening gambit.
The judge in the referenced case produced an astonishing opinion that’s well worth reading in its entirety. It’s written by an 85 year old Reagan Appointee who has produced one of the most cogent critiques of Trump’s assault on free speech I’ve yet seen (proving that not all elders are too addled to serve — his wisdom here is welcome.)
Here’s a rundown of it by Chris Geidner. An excerpt:
Young does more in one decision than perhaps any public official has done this year to detail the specific methods President Donald Trump and the Trump administration use to act illegally and unconstitutionally, the many ways the other branches and outside institutions have capitulated to those acts, and the essential and powerful ways people — and the legal system — can push back.
It is, however, ultimately a challenge to America.
Young is aware — as he detailed in a 10-page section of his ruling explaining “Justice in the Trump Era” — that he and the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts cannot hold the line. In a conclusion that first quoted Ronald Reagan’s 1967 statement that freedom is “never more than one generation away from extinction,” Young then wrote:
I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected.
Is he correct?
That fear and question might have felt forced or exaggerated for emphasis elsewhere, but, by time it was posed on page 160 of Young’s ruling, it was simply a statement from a judge who has been on the federal bench for 40 years, has been alive for more than double that time, is overseeing multiple cases addressing this administration’s actions, and is questioning what’s to come.
I think we know what’s to come unless we can save ourselves.