Episodes From the Great Disappearance

 

 

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

+ Reporter: “Do you think you have the authority, the power, to round up people and deport them, and then you’re under no obligation to a court to show the evidence against them?”

Trump: “That is what the law says [sic], and that’s what our country needs.”

+ In late February, the Canadian actress Jasmine Mooney was kidnapped by ICE after she tried to renew her work visa at the US/Mexico border. She was cuffed, thrown into a van, held prisoner for 12 days, denied access to a lawyer, made to sleep on concrete floors and given a forced pregnancy test before being sent back to Canada with no explanation from DHS officials for the brutality of her treatment. Mooney described her surreal ordeal in vivid terms for an article in The Guardian.

+ On March 5, Ranjani Srinivasan was told by email that her student visa had been revoked after she attended a couple of protests and liked some social media posts in support of Palestinians in Gaza. Ranjani, a 37-year-old architect from India who was on the verge of completing her doctoral program in urban planning at Columbia, withdrew from school and fled to Canada after ICE knocked on her dorm door and accused her of advocating “violence and terrorism.” In an interview with Boston radio station WBUR, Ranjani said:

I’m not a terrorist sympathizer. I’m not pro-Hamas. And I think it’s really dangerous to label any free speech that somebody disagrees with, or any sort of peaceful objection to global issues, as terrorism. I think it just creates a climate of fear where people are scared to share their opinions. There’s a feeling that your visa could be revoked for even the simplest political speech, and the whole point of an American university is to have debate and nuance about ideas to contest them freely. I think there’s a general fear of doing that now.

+ On March 7, Fabian Schmidt was detained by immigration officers at Logan Airport in Boston on his way back from Luxembourg. Schmidt holds a green card and has lived and worked in the US since moving to the States with his mother in 2007. He became a permanent resident in 2008 and has worked in the US as an electrical engineer ever since. As ICE officers interrogated him and demanded he surrender his green card, his partner, a cardiologist and US citizen, waited for him for four hours at the airport. During his detention, Schmidt was stripped naked, placed in a cold shower, and deprived of food, water, and medication. He collapsed before being hospitalized at Mass General. After his release from the hospital, Schmidt was taken to an ICE facility in Burlington, Mass., and then transferred to an ICE jail in Rhode Island. Schmidt’s green card had recently been renewed and there were no pending legal cases against him. He wasn’t served with a warrant at the time of his arrest and wasn’t permitted to contact his family for three days. Schmidt has an 8-year-old daughter who is a US citizen.

+ On March 9, a French space researcher was subjected to a “random” search upon arrival in the US. His phone and computer were confiscated and searched. The DHS agents found a series of text messages describing Trump’s treatment of scientists, which they used to accuse him of harboring a “hatred of toward Trump that could be described as terrorism.” He was held in custody overnight and deported back to Europe the next day. Agence France Press later reported that DHS had accused him of “hateful and conspiratorial messages” and had referred him to the FBI.

+ On March 12, Dr. Rasha Alawieh was detained by immigration officials at Boston’s Logan Airport. She was told that her visa had been revoked and that she would be deported back to Lebanon, where she’d been visiting her parents. Her phone and computer were confiscated. Dr. Alawieh works at Brown Medicine and Rhode Island Hospital. She had secured an H-1B visa that doesn’t expire until 2027. She was trained in the U.S. at Ohio State, the University of Washington, and Yale as a transplant surgeon. She hasn’t been convicted or accused of a crime. In court filings, ICE claimed to have discovered photos on her phone that were “sympathetic” to leaders of Hezbollah. It turns out that the images weren’t Dr. Alaweigh’s but had been posted to a group chat she belonged to.

+ On March 17, masked ICE agents arrested Badar Khan Suri outside his own in Arlington, Virginia. Bara is an Indian national with a student visa who was doing post-doctoral research at Georgetown University. The agents told Badar his visa had been revoked and he would be deported to India. Badar has no criminal record and is married to a US citizen. Badar’s lawyer, Hassan Ahmad, told Politico that he had been targeted because of his wife’s Palestinian heritage. In a sworn statement, Badar’s wife, Mapheze Saleh, said the detention of her husband “has completely upended our lives…Our children are in desperate need of their father and miss him dearly. As a mother of three children, I desperately need his support to take care of them and me.” On Thursday, a federal court blocked Badar’s deportation.

+ ICE has arrested more people (13,000) in the first 22 days of February 2025 than any other month in the last seven years

COUNTERPUNCH