TIt defining the characteristic of American democracy, you might be forgiven to have thought is that you can say what you think without having to fear that you are arrested, locked up or expelled.
The United States is not unique in its commitment to this idea, but this country has unusually taken it seriously. No law has been decisively repudiated by the United States Supreme Court as a 1798 sedition Act, which made a crime to publish a false or scandalous criticism of government officials.
American newspapers, unlike their counterparts in most other nations, can print government secrets without fear that the security services will hide their editorial rooms. The first amendment was understood to protect a very wide range of political speeches, in particular, especially, by immigrants. As a result of all this, there is – or there is, until very recently – many things that could be said in New York that one could not say in Istanbul or Mumbai, or even in Berlin or London.
The Trump student administration of students who protested the bombing of Israel from Gaza marks an astonishing and radical break with what could rightly be considered as the idea of Central America. Immigration agents force a doctoral student in an unmarked van in Somerville, Massachusetts, arrest a recent graduate in front of his wife in eight months in the hall of a building belonging to a University of Columbia in New York, captures a legitimate political speech of Georgetown from his home to Washington DC – All that seems, it seems, for their legitimate political speech. These are the types of scenes that we expect to see in the most repressive regimes in the world; It’s really shocking to see them go here.
So far, arrests have not generated general indignation in the United States, perhaps because students are foreign, or because pro-Palestinian demonstrators have been vilified by the main political parties, many universities and a large part of the media.
But an administration that imprison and expels foreign students for their pro-Palestinian plea is unlikely to stop with foreign students or, moreover, with a pro-Palestinian plea. The Roundup of Trump students has already gone visa holders to legal permanent residents, and administration officials said they intended to come after naturalized citizens. And the argument that the administration is advancing to justify the cancellation of students’ visas – that students advocacy compromise the American foreign policy – could as easily be made with regard to those who defend to support any other cause than the Trump administration is unfavorable.
The arrests of pro-Palestinian students have already caused immense damage to this democracy. It is difficult to transmit how deeply these arrests have transformed American universities in a few weeks. In a legal complaint filed earlier this week, the teachers describe a “climate of fear and repression” on university campuses across the United States, international teachers and students bringing back groups that engage in political advocacy, renounce the opportunities to publish their work, rubbing their web pages on the references that are in private authorities. (The case was filed by the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association; the Knight First Amendment Institute, which I direct, is a lawyer.) Many international students and teachers are really terrified that masked government agents could present themselves at any time.
All this is likely to worsen. The arrests of student demonstrators are only a broader manifestation of the Trump administration against democratic institutions and freedoms. While students disappear in ICE detention centers, Trump accelerates the rest of the authoritarian game book – threatening the media, extorting universities, imposing sanctions on lawyers that the president perceives his political enemies and intimidating the judges. If he continues on this path without meeting more resistance than he has met so far, authoritarianism in its own right is just at the corner of the street.
And yet, it can be the arrest of demonstrators who constitute the most serious threat to our democracy which is quickly transformed. Protest has been the engine of social change in this country for many decades, and it is difficult to envisage a means for Americans to recover their democracy now who do not imply millions of people who descend into the street. Student dissident arrests are a warning to anyone who could be tempted to try it. If we can do that, we can do it too, and we will.
Students are persecuted to exercise a right that we all need more than ever. Come to their defense for this reason, if not for any other.
