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Mother Jones illustration; Courtesy attorneys for Momodou Taal and Rumeysa Ozturk; Bonnie Cash\/Pool\/CNP\/Zuma<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n On Tuesday afternoon, <\/span>a federal judge in New York\u2019s Northern District heard opening arguments in the case of Momodou Taal v. Trump<\/a><\/em>. Neither party was present in the courtroom\u2014in large part because Trump\u2019s Department of Homeland Security has been trying to find Taal for days, reportedly staking out his home and entering his university\u2019s campus.<\/p>\n Taal, a British-Gambian doctoral student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, sued the administration on February 15<\/a> to challenge Trump\u2019s executive orders<\/a> curtailing free speech and seeking to deport pro-Palestinian activists<\/a>, which have been paired with a wave of attacks by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers\u2014in some cases masked and hooded\u2014on graduate and undergraduate students.<\/p>\n At 12:52 a.m. on Friday\u2014within five days of Taal\u2019s lawsuit\u2014Taal\u2019s lawyers received an email \u201cinviting\u201d their client to \u201csurrender to ICE custody.\u201d At 7:00 p.m. the following day, Trump\u2019s lawyers filed a brief informing Taal that the State Department had already revoked his visa, without his knowledge, on March 14\u2014the day before <\/em>Taal filed his lawsuit. Days later, ICE agents arrived on Cornell\u2019s campus attempting to find and seize him.<\/p>\n Over the past two weeks, the Trump administration has targeted at least eight foreign academics in America for deportation, often sending officers to snatch them off the street or in their homes, retroactively changing what they\u2019re charged with, and shipping them halfway across the country, far from their families lawyers\u2014increasingly in apparent defiance<\/a> of court orders against their rendition. <\/a>Members of the commentariat like venture capitalist Paul Graham have mused that \u201cthe students ICE is disappearing seem such a random selection<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n But experts and people close to the cases say it\u2019s not random at all.<\/a>\u00a0The scholars in question are immigrant academics\u2014Gambian, Palestinian, Korean, and Turkish\u2014targeted for pro-Palestinian social media posts, op-eds, and participation in last year\u2019s campus-based opposition to the continuing slaughter in Gaza.<\/p>\n Momodou Taal knew<\/span> this was coming for months. \u201cGiven my public exposure, if he were to deport student protesters, I think I would be at the top of the list as a target,\u201d he told Mother Jones<\/em> in January<\/a>. But, Taal said in a recent Intercept <\/em>podcast appearance<\/a>, his personal stakes pale in comparison to those of Palestinians in Gaza, where the number of known dead has passed 50,000\u2014as the US continues shipping bombs and warplanes to Israel, and as Israeli officials threaten a full-scale military takeover of the territory, \u201cI know it\u2019s a very frightening moment,\u201d Taal said in that Intercept<\/em> appearance, <\/strong>\u201cbut for me, this is the time to double down.\u201d<\/p>\n Taal\u2019s lawsuit, filed with fellow Cornell doctoral student Sriram Parasuram and Mukoma Wa Ng\u0169g\u0129, a Cornell literature professor, asserts that Trump\u2019s late January executive orders cracking down on campus speech violate both Taal\u2019s right to political expression and the rights of those around him to hear it.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s quite calculated and deliberate,\u201d Taal told me on Thursday. <\/p>\n Suing the president \u201cis the only form of redress many of us have, in this moment, as a form of protection.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n ICE agents, usually plainclothed and sometimes masked, are accosting students in the streets, using what even former House Rep. Ron Paul calls \u201cGestapo\u201d tactics.<\/a><\/p>\n Trump\u2019s executive orders conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, Taal said, have \u201cclearly placed a target upon many people\u2019s backs.\u201d Taal recommends that students in his situation \u201clawyer up\u201d\u2014because the Trump administration, he said, is not acting alone: right-wing groups such as Canary Mission, an online doxxing platform that collects the personal information of anti-Zionist students and professors, have claimed credit for some students\u2019 detentions.<\/a><\/p>\n Suing the president, Taal said, \u201cis the only form of redress many of us have, in this moment, as a form of protection.\u201d Yunseo Chung<\/a>, a Korean undergraduate at Columbia University who has been a legal permanent resident of the US since she was seven years old, filed suit on Monday for a temporary restraining order to prevent her deportation.<\/a> Her case went to court on the same day as Taal\u2019s, and her order was quickly granted; Taal\u2019s own request for a temporary restraining order was denied<\/a> <\/strong>by a New Jersey judge a day after it was filed.<\/p>\n \u201cI think the stakes in all these cases are the same,\u201d said Abed Ayoub, the executive director of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), whose lawyers are representing Taal. While each case has its nuances\u2014some students have been detained, others have not; some are on green cards, others on visas\u2014\u201cwhat we\u2019re seeing is an attack on the First Amendment rights of folks in this country to express themselves,\u201d Ayoub said.<\/p>\n Chung\u2019s suit accuses the Trump administration of a \u201clarger pattern of attempted US government repression of constitutionally protected protest activity and other forms of speech,\u201d and asserts\u00a0that the federal government aims to \u201cretaliate against and punish noncitizens like Ms. Chung for their participation in protests.\u201d Taal\u2019s asserts that Trump\u2019s executive orders prohibit noncitizens from \u201cengaging in constitutionally protected speech\u201d that the Trump administration \u201cmay subjectively interpret as expressing a \u2018hostile attitude\u201d to its interests by deploying the threat of deportation.<\/p>\n That threat, Taal says, casts a frighteningly broad net. \u201cIt\u2019s important that people recognize that it could be anyone, and that they need to rise up, and escalate, and refuse this to be normalized,\u201d Taal said Thursday.<\/p>\n Chung and Taal are<\/span> now<\/span> two of many. Mahmoud Khalil<\/a>, a legal permanent resident of Palestinian nationality, and a Columbia graduate student until December of last year,\u00a0is also suing the president for the right to have his immigration case heard near his home in New York; he was arrested by ICE at his Manhattan residence on March 8 and, after initially being imprisoned in a New Jersey immigration detention facility, was remanded to an ICE \u201cprocessing center\u201d in Louisiana, where he is still being held. His fellow Columbia graduate student, Ranjani Srinivasan,<\/a> fled the US for India on March 11 after ICE came knocking at her door. International students and professors Badar Khan Suri<\/a> of Georgetown University in Washington, DC, Rasha Alawieh<\/a> of Brown University in Rhode Island, Alireza Doroudi<\/a> of the University of Alabama (who has not publicly engaged in pro-Palestine activism), and Rumeysa Ozturk<\/a> of Tufts University in Massachusetts have also been seized in the past two weeks. <\/p>\n Chilling footage of Ozturk\u2019s arrest<\/a> swept the internet Thursday: six masked individuals in civilian clothes surrounded the graduate student on a sidewalk in Somerville.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cHey ma\u2019am,\u201d one said, and grabbed Ozturk\u2019s wrists. She screamed as several others surrounded her.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s important that people recognize that it could be anyone, and that they need to rise up, and escalate, and refuse this to be normalized.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n \u201cCan I just call the police?\u201d Ozturk asked in the surveillance video. \u201cWe are the police,\u201d one masked, hooded person responded. They handcuffed her and dragged her away.<\/a><\/p>\n In a Thursday press conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended Ozturk\u2019s abduction. \u201cEvery time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa,\u201d he told reporters Thursday. Ozturk\u2019s \u201clunatic\u201d behavior appears to consist only of co-authoring one student newspaper op-ed<\/a>, exactly one year before she was detained, asking her university to acknowledge a student government resolution calling for divestment from Israel. She has not been charged with any offense, but was painted by Rubio as \u201ca social activist that tears up our university campuses\u201d\u2014and was forcibly disappeared.<\/p>\n Rubio\u2019s State Department, meanwhile, has issued new guidance<\/a> calling for extensive screening of student visa applicants\u2019 social media for any posts that \u201cdemonstrate a degree of approval\u201d of what it calls \u201cterrorist activity.\u201d<\/p>\n Ayoub, of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, says the recent spate of ICE abductions echoes the Nixon era: In 1972, the Nixon White House deployed an extensive surveillance program against Arab communities in the United States\u2014scrutinizing the visa status of anyone who appeared to have an Arabic last name\u2014ostensibly to screen out terrorists.<\/p>\n In practice, Ayoub said, the policy inevitably led to unjust detainments, deportations, and even disappearances<\/a>: \u201cA number of our community members just disappeared,\u201d he said. \u201cThere was no social media, and nobody walked around with a cell phone. So people just disappeared, and you wouldn\u2019t hear from them until six, seven months later.\u201d More than 150,000 people were investigated.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cBefore all of this started,\u201d Ayoub said, \u201cI was warning people that we will see the same: people just picked up and moved to a location where we\u2019re not going to hear from them, because this is the practice of what happened before.\u201d <\/p>\n Then, as now, he said, those in power were \u201cbanking on not everybody being upset, on people buying into the \u2018threat to national security\u2019 type of language.\u201d But it\u2019s no longer as easy for authorities to move in darkness; this time, people are organizing. The same day that footage of Ozturk\u2019s arrest was released, more than one thousand people rallied on her behalf<\/a> in Somerville, and protests in support of Mahmoud Khalil<\/a> have been taking place across the country since his arrest almost three weeks ago.<\/p>\n The Trump administration, Ayoub said, is \u201cbetting on the idea that not many are going to come out and defend the students, or support the students, or defend their right to express their opinions in this country. But that, I think, is where they\u2019re mistaken.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n
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