Freedom of Speech
TL;DR
The Trump administration is waging a full-on war against free speech, and while they are targeting the most vulnerable first, they will work their way up to harassing and jailing citizens. We must support those currently targeted not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because it’s our self-interest.
Why Was Rümeysa Arrested?
In my previous post about Rümeysa Öztürk, I deliberately omitted any discussion of why she was arrested, as I preferred to focus strictly on the means and methods used. But if you aren’t aware of what crime she committed to rate six abductors, you aren’t alone, as the only semi-official reason I can find was in a sworn statement by Tufts University in support of her, in which they say they received an email the next day from INS that stated;
“… Rümeysa’s visa was canceled because she was a “non-immigrant status violator” (citing 237 (a)(1)(C)(i) of the Immigration and Naturalization Act) and/or that the United States believed that her presence in the country would result in “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States” (citing 237 (a)(4)(C)(i)).
I highly recommend reading the whole statement, as it has many good details that are hard to find elsewhere. For example, her student visa was still valid at the time of her arrest. Regarding the speculation that it was her role in a March 2024 editorial in The Tufts Daily student newspaper, the statement states that the editorial had not received a single complaint and was not violating any school policies. I have read the editorial and found it relatively mild considering the topic and compared to other student editorials I have read.
So, absent a clear statement from the US government (don’t hold your breath), it appears that Rümeysa was targeted simply for voicing her opinion. That is illegal. The Supreme Court found in Bridges v. Wixon (1945) that the First Amendment applies to all people lawfully admitted to the United States.
“..… once an alien lawfully enters and resides in this country he becomes invested with the rights guaranteed by the Constitution to all people within our borders. Such rights include those protected by the First and Fifth Amendments and by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. None of these provisions acknowledges any distinctions between citizens and resident aliens. They extend their inalienable privileges to all ‘persons’ and guard against any encroachment of those rights by federal or state authority. So, this issue is settled in law by the highest court in the land, yet the Trump administration is doing it anyway. This is an odd way for constitutional ‘originalists’ to act. I doubt the six justices in the majority on this decision were ‘woke’ as the case was tried in 1945, and they were all white men.
They have also moved to remove people with green cards (Legal Permanent Residents, or LPRs), and now the president is saying Homegrowns are next.
The administration’s behavior shows they know they are outside the law. They snatch people off the street and then play cat-and-mouse with the abductee to keep their families and attorneys from knowing where they are and then move them either out of state or out of the country to avoid legal review. This.Is.The.Behavior.Of.Fascists. If you aren’t frightened and angry, what are you waiting for?
What To Do About It
So, it’s one thing to read articles and get worked up about the state of things, but that doesn’t do anything except cause more stress. Our family has decided to take action on issues we are upset about and try to help, but with the added benefits of helping complete our stress cycles and having a feeling of doing something. To date, we have distributed Red Cards along with multi-lingual instructional flyers to individuals and organizations in our community, upped our donations by several orders of magnitude to causes that are fighting for the things we believe in, and called and wrote our representatives to let them know this is not acceptable. In addition, I am attending rallies and protests as well as writing this blog and I will continue to do all of these things, in the open, unmasked, and lawfully because I believe they are not only the right thing to do and that it is my right as an American citizen to do so. I would hope that you will take a moment and find some action to take that aligns with your beliefs and take it. The more of us making noise and calling out the bad behavior, the better.
Banner image by SWinxy, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons