The American Gestapo won't spare anybody

On the coming police state

Welcome to a Wednesday edition of Progress Report.

Today is our last day in Amsterdam, the conclusion of a very necessary trip that provided for some important perspective and education for the years of political and culture fights to come. This was a working trip, and I’ve got a number of stories prepped for the weeks ahead. Normal newsletters will resume in the next day or two.

Today’s newsletter is an urgent one, informed by a visit I made last night. I’m coming back to chaos, aren’t I?

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The Anne Frank House sits on the Prinsengracht canal in central Amsterdam, a row house with the secret annex where the young diarist and her family hid from the Nazis. Now a museum, the building is split into two: the spacious front half, where Otto Frank’s associates maintained their business, and the cramped annex, accessible only by sliding book case, where the Frank family and four others spent two years stowed away before being found and arrested by a German officer.

Tourists shuffle through all day and night, uniformly solemn and silent but for the creaking wooden floorboards and whispers of guided audio tours. Stepping into the past reminds you of its recency, and outside, buildings are old enough that it’s possible to imagine what it was like when Hitler’s army occupied this moody city of narrow alleys and crooked houses. How many of them concealed people facing persecution from the occupying government, innocent Jews and other undesirables who lived in fear of armed men barging into their homes and sending them away to some distant squalid prison?

Walking freely in the streets, you shudder at the thought of living under a government that kidnaps and disappears legal residents for political or religious reasons.

Then the breaking news emails hit.

On March 6, Mahmoud Khalil emailed the interim president of Columbia University with a desperate plea. “I haven’t been able to sleep, fearing that ICE or a dangerous individual might come to my home,” Khalil, a green card holder and permanent US resident, wrote. “I urge you to intervene and provide the necessary protections to prevent further harm.”

The next day, ICE arrested Khalil inside of his apartment building and took him to an undisclosed location. Days later, it was reported that he was in a detention facility in Louisiana, and the Trump administration announced — crowed even — that it was revoking his green card. There were no formal charges pressed, no accusations of criminal activity. The White House would only say that Khalil had participated in activities “aligned to Hamas,” with no further details or specific accusations.

Trump administration officials have instead justified Khalil’s arrest with the vague provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which gives the administration the right to deport “an alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

Dangerous or Endangered?

So in what way did Khalil present a serious threat to US foreign policy?

A Syrian-born Palestinian, Khalil led some of the protests at Columbia against Israel’s ethnic cleansing in Gaza, then helped lead negotiations between protestors and the school when tensions were at their highest. A distinguished grad student, he finished his coursework without incident in December, and due to be awarded his Master’s degree in May, he has continued to live in campus housing with his wife, a US citizen who is eight months pregnant.

Stripped of his green card and the full legal rights it confers, still without any actual criminal charges lodged against him, Khalil nw sits in a prison a thousand miles away from his family. Though a judge has temporarily blocked his rapid deportation, Trump has since called Khalil’s arrest “the first of many to come,” promising to pursue students across the country engaged in “pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity.”

What Trump is actually saying is that he plans to crack down on speech that he and his political patrons don’t like, and he’s willing to use the full power of the state to do it. The president is promising that there will be more critics of his government’s policies who will be surveilled, more inconvenient activists who will have their homes broken into and legal rights violated, more permanent residents who will be taken and disappeared. Trump is celebrating his weaponization of the police to suppress opposition, to target people who object to this country’s role in foreign wars, to take advantage of vague statutes to claim absolute power.

So why the muted response from Democrats? Why did only 13 members of Congress sign a letter demanding Khalil’s release?

The situation is ostensibly complicated by the fact that he was protesting an Israeli war, which as Trump’s triumphant post indicates, has been classified as antisemitism by those who support the war. And there were many Democrats who helped to make this happen by visiting Columbia to protest the protestors, repeatedly condemning them on broadcast television, and playing into this trap.

Just the Beginning

As a Jewish person, you’re taught to maintain an all-consuming vigilance against antisemitism, to understand that the past is prologue, that historic persecutions promise future attacks. For many, that fear has turned into a whatever-it-takes approach to defending against any and all threats, real or perceived. It has codified the belief that Israel is capable of no wrongdoing and that its critics are automatically bigots.

And now, according to some prominent voices, including the Anti-Defamation League, it also means that protesting — exercising the right to free speech — is enough to warrant arrest and deportation.

Walking through the Anne Frank House, especially as a Jewish person, you can imagine the walls closing in, the electricity cut, the fear of making a sound. You begin to truly understand the scourge of antisemitism and the evil that it can inspire, and you maybe feel a pang of gratitude that there is this vigilance now against it. But then you come to a dilemma: what happens if a Jewish person doesn’t agree with American foreign policy?

I do not think that Khalil hates Jewish people — many of his fellow student protestors were Jewish — but whether or not he is antisemitic is immaterial. Because what is happening to him, and what Trump has promised will happen to others like him, will not end with Palestinian protestors. It never does.

The far-right has been setting the legal infrastructure and priming the social conditions for far-reaching attacks on other groups of people.

Once seen as settled law, the right is itching to reverse same-sex marriage, and it has so completely scapegoated trans people that both states and the federal government are now regularly passing laws that further restrict their rights. They are excluded from sports and public bathrooms, and increasingly from even using their chosen names. A new bill in Texas would create a new crime called Gender Fraud, which would essentially make it illegal to be an out trans person. In Iowa, protections for trans people were just removed from the state’s civil rights law.

American citizens have been caught up in the ICE raids intended to capture undocumented immigrants and quickly deport them to Guantanamo Bay, a human rights violation that has now been codified by the Laken Riley Act that so many Democrats supported. Law enforcement has been empowered to racially profile people, asking for their papers in the middle of the street, with grim consequences should they not be carrying them.

This is an administration that views diversity as a conspiracy, that fires high-ranking Black officials and replaces them with less accomplished white ones, that scapegoats people of color generally for tragic plane crashes. These are not echoes of the propaganda that was used by the Nazis against Jewish people, but modern reproductions.

The president wants to abolish the Department of Education so that it can redirect federal funds to Christian schools and private academies that only wealthy white people can attend. Colleges and universities are being forced to end Civil Rights education under threat of defunding, public schools are increasingly banned from discuss gender and sexuality. Military schools have had posters of Black leaders ripped from the walls. Trump’s housing authority is now actively assisting in re-segregation.

Jewish people who believe that this administration is fighting for their safety are worse than naive. They are praising a president and a movement that draws some of its most fervent support from neo-Nazis, who have increasingly close ties to government officials and people with influence in the White House. This administration is run by people who perform Nazi salutes, who have long histories of posting actual antisemitic rhetoric, that would turn on every Jew they know for the opportunity to buy into a profitable crypto meme coin.

This isn’t about combatting antisemitism, but instead, instituting fascism. That Trump will never kill six million Jewish people does not make the policies he is pursuing any less alarming. Oppression by the state is encroaching on an increasing number of Americans and lawful residents and others who are supposed to be protected by the legal system.

At the end of the Anne Frank House tour, there is a quote from Otto Frank, who survived the prison camps, struggled for months to find his daughters, and then dedicated himself to using Anne’s diaries to prevent future atrocities.

“The only thing we can do is to learn from the past and to realize what discrimination and persecution of innocent people means.”

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