Within a couple weeks of my first piece on the brazen authoritarian shift we’re witnessing in our government, the disappearance and detention of green card and student visa holders for their lawful dissent has continued, as has the Trump administration’s blatant defiance of court orders on deportation.
Though I vaguely referenced the forced disappearance of Mahmoud Khalil for his involvement with a peaceful protest, this has happened multiple times over in rapid succession.
After Khalil, ICE detained Rumeysa Ozturk, a graduate student at Tufts University and Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown University graduate, both of whom have valid F-1 student visas. ICE has also attempted to detain Yunseo Chung, a green card holder and graduate student at Columbia University.
All four of these people have been harassed and three detained for exercising their right to free speech, a right on which this administration finds the audacity to lecture our closest allies, while relying on dubious, contradictory and vague legal precedent to harass them as such.
While the courts have blunted ICE’s attempts to detain Chung, I have little faith the Trump administration will listen, as it has deported alleged Venezuelan gang members to a mega prison in El Salvador despite multiple court rulings barring their deportations.
As for the Venezuelans imprisoned in El Salvador, ICE has targeted men simply for having tattoos, a strategy which has yielded extrajudicial deportations of people with no criminal records to what is essentially a transnational penal colony.
Watching this unfold, we should all be reminded of the famous quote by Martin Niemöller. Trump’s piecemeal attacks on freedom of speech and association and the hemming and hawing of his supporters to justify it all are meant to keep us divided and gaslit as the administration gradually increases the breadth of its crackdowns.
If we don’t call out these state-sanctioned abductions for what they are, they will become the new normal, seemingly irrelevant until they happen in your classroom, office or neighborhood, perhaps to someone you know — perhaps even to you.
This, I believe, is also why Elon Musk and others like him have developed a renewed fixation on attacking empathy. These test runs of mass repression depend on us having extreme callousness, apathy and ignorance towards each other.
Regardless of how much empathy you may hold for the rights of others, these encroachments are only the beginning. The Trump administration is already expanding from attacks on pro-Palestine, non-citizen protestors, evidenced by Trump’s desire to treat all forms of protest against Tesla as domestic terrorism.
With Trump’s claim that all forms of boycotting Tesla are illegal amidst the formation of an FBI-ATF task force to investigate anti-Tesla vandalism, Niemöller’s observations appear set to repeat themselves.
We must be especially wary of any attempts to conflate peaceful protesting against Tesla with illegal acts, lest we gaslight ourselves like we did after 2020 and once again overlook the detention and disappearance of protestors in the name of combatting a largely nonexistent threat.
Though I do not condone acts of vandalism against the property of others, it perplexes me how putting a Molotov cocktail through a Cyber Truck elicits a more prompt response from the president than a mob storming Capitol Hill while threatening to murder his former vice president.
This also raises questions about Trump’s understanding of domestic terrorism and the right’s true embrace of blanket apathy. After all, “stand back and stand by” is as questionable a warning to militia groups that may seek to riot as “we love you, go home,” is a questionable response to said riot. You could almost say the right wants to have it both ways.
Returning to Tesla, we see this again as Elon whines on social media about how anybody could possibly hate him, despite his extensive track record of enabling and endorsing hate speech. In his mind, Niemöller’s poem begins not with the holders of green cards and student visas but shares of Tesla stock.
To this, I say that while these acts of vandalism concern me, we mustn’t forget that all cars matter, and that exclusively treating the vandalism of Teslas as domestic terrorism is simply not fair to other cars that get vandalized at all hours by people all over the political spectrum.
In all seriousness, we must not be fooled by their self-imposed victimhood. Before automatically hearing out their complaints, no matter what degree of validity they hold, remember that they openly view empathy as an “exploit” and a “sin.”
While vandalism may be illegal, opting to divest from, boycott and peacefully protest Tesla are most certainly not, nor are critiques of our government by valid green card and visa holders.
How someone could truly not understand that public backlash is the natural response to propagating ideas the public hates is beyond me. I suppose this is just what happens when being developmentally stunted is core to your political ideology.
In no world will an emotionally healthy person show virulent apathy and cruelty to those around them yet feel victimized by the inevitable negative backlash.
This administration is, without a doubt, run by the world’s most ambitious, least subtle narcissists. Let’s make them the least successful as well.
These detentions and deportations are a watershed moment to do just that by showing we will not tolerate its attempts to divide us with its increasingly ignorant and divisive policies.
Contact Jacob Whitney at jwhitney@oxy.edu
