On Wednesday, masked plainclothes immigration officers arrested Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish citizen on a student visa, outside Tufts University, where she’s studying for a PhD. Video of her arrest, showing her being taken while walking down a street, has gone viral. Ozturk is now being held in a Louisiana detention center.
This comes after a series of similar actions by the federal government. Just two days earlier, Yunseo Chung, a 21-year-old Columbia student and green card holder who has lived in the US since she was 7, sued the Trump administration for trying to arrest and deport her.
The administration has targeted Chung and Ozturk for the same reason they detained Mahmoud Khalil earlier this month: pro-Palestinian views and activism.
The government’s actions are a serious threat to free speech. A Trump administration official explicitly told the Free Press that the cause for Khalil’s arrest was not that he committed a crime. “The allegation here is not that he was breaking the law,” the anonymous official said. “He was mobilizing support for Hamas and spreading antisemitism in a way that is contrary to the foreign policy of the US.” (Khalil was part of the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University when he was a graduate student last year.)
Ozturk, Chung, and Khalil are in effect being targeted for their speech and activism — activity that, in all three cases, the administration has deemed to be aligned with Hamas.
These cases might be some of the more extreme examples of the US government’s disregard for free speech. But unfortunately, they’re not unique.
There have been many other instances when law enforcement trampled on people’s rights to protest and free speech. In one particular case, permanent residents of Palestinian descent were also arrested and threatened to be deported, all for daring to take the First Amendment at its word.
That case ended with a blistering rebuke by a judge. But the incident — and developments since then — shows that the Trump administration’s crackdown on the First Amendment, and pro-Palestinian speech in particular, has a long and shameful history.
Before Khalil, there was the LA Eight
“When I heard about Mahmoud [Khalil]’s case, my mind went immediately to the LA Eight,” said Maya Berry, the executive director of the Arab American Institute.
In 1987, eight young immigrants — seven of whom were Palestinian — were arrested in Los Angeles, accused of supporting the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which the US had deemed a terrorist organization. They became known as the LA Eight. Two of those arrested, like Khalil, were permanent residents.
The FBI had surveilled the group for a while, monitoring their protests, literature, and the people who attended their events. An informant sent to a dinner the group helped organize reported that it was clear the dinner was put on to raise money for terrorism, despite the fact that he did not speak Arabic. Instead, the informant came to that conclusion merely because of the tone of the music and speeches at the dinner.
Eventually, the FBI deemed the group to be “anti-Israel” and “anti-Reagan” and recommended that they be deported. This was not because they had committed a crime; it was because the government was specifically targeting them for their speech and support for Palestinian rights, much like the Trump administration is today targeting students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests.
The LA Eight’s case to remain in the US dragged on for two decades. None were ever deported, and during that time, some members went on to become US citizens. It went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which sent the case back down to immigration court. And in 2007, the case was finally dismissed, when a judge called the whole saga “an embarrassment to the rule of law.”
How the war on terror became a war on civil liberties
The story of the LA Eight reflects that anti-Palestinian racism has been deeply entrenched in US policy for a long time. But in the almost four decades since the US government began trying to deport them, the First Amendment has only been more eroded, especially for Arab and Muslim Americans, as well as those who support the Palestinian cause.
In his 2021 book Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, journalist Spencer Ackerman documents how America’s war on terror resulted in neither peace nor victory, and instead laid the groundwork for an emboldened surveillance state that curtailed people’s civil liberties.
The 2001 Patriot Act, which greatly expanded law enforcement surveillance, exacerbated racial profiling in the name of national security. Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians were detained by the FBI and viewed as security threats. The no-fly list disproportionately targeted Muslims. And law enforcement agencies started surveilling and infiltrating Muslim communities across the United States.
“The 9/11 moment was itself a product of longstanding trends, but what we’re seeing today is really the fruits of all of those really rotten seeds that the government planted in the early years after 9/11,” said Mohammad Tajsar, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.
It wasn’t just people’s views or speech that were targeted. The laws that passed after 9/11 also undermined the First Amendment by encroaching on Americans’ religious liberty. In 2009, the ACLU released a comprehensive report that documented how the post-9/11 reforms, among other things, infringed on Muslim Americans’ right to practice their religion through charitable giving because of “terrorism financing” laws.
In 2001, for example, the US government announced that it was investigating over 30 Muslim charities. By the end of that year, the government had frozen the assets of the three largest Muslim charitable organizations in the United States, forcing them to shut down.
The contrast with the balance between civil liberties and anti-terrorism measures a few years prior was stark. In 1995, when Timothy McVeigh, an anti-government white supremacist, bombed a federal building and killed 168 people, politicians and media reports initially blamed the bombing on Muslims until it became clear that McVeigh was responsible.
McVeigh was ultimately sentenced to death, but it was after legal due process. Congress didn’t rush to pass legislation to crack down on white supremacy or domestic terrorism. Instead, it passed a law in 1996 that made it easier to prosecute people suspected of having ties to foreign terrorist organizations — something that still expanded surveillance of Muslims, not white supremacists.
“When terrorism was white — when its identity and its purpose claimed the same heritage as a substantial amount of the dominant American racial caste — America sympathized with principled objections against unleashing the coercive, punitive, and violent powers of the state,” Ackerman wrote. “When terrorism was white, the prospect of criminalizing a large swath of Americans was unthinkable.”
After 9/11, it became normalized.
Expanding the security state has come at the cost of weakening the Bill of Rights. In 2010, in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the Supreme Court ruled against the Humanitarian Law Project, a nonprofit seeking to help the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Turkey — both deemed terrorist organizations by the US government — learn nonviolent conflict resolution tactics.
The US government claimed that even peaceful assistance like conflict resolution is not protected by the First Amendment because it amounted to materially supporting terrorist organizations. The Court agreed.
“[It] basically shut down First Amendment challenges to these material support statutes and basically suggested, in some ways, that core constitutional rights can give way to these national security exigencies,” Tajsar said. “That particular case happened to be about nonprofits. But the big picture was that the constitution won’t stand in the way of a lot of these government trends.”
That legal philosophy — that national security interests take precedence over individual liberties — is likely what the Trump administration is banking on to deport students for participating in pro-Palestinian protests. After all, that’s what the Supreme Court argued in 1954, when it decided that permanent residents could be deported for their ties to the Communist Party.
Ultimately, the LA Eight, Khalil, Chung, and Ozturk are clear victims of anti-Palestinian racism that runs so deep that it pushes the government to infringe on people’s constitutionally protected speech — just as the government did to communists during the Red Scare. But they’re also free speech cases that have broader implications for every American’s rights.
“This is a matter of: are we a free country or not?” Berry said. “Will we honor liberty or not?”
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