Donald Trump and his administration are carrying out the broadest assault on the rights held by those in the country on visas in decades.
Democrats risk being left in the dust.
Tuesday evening marked the latest incident in which a foreign student on a visa in the United States was snatched up by plainclothes federal agents who refused to show identification or other documents to bystanders or the student herself. As with previous cases, the student — Rumeysa Ozturk — appears to have been shipped across the country with the apparent goal of putting her case before a conservative court, having been targeted for the publication of an op-ed critical of the Israeli assault on Gaza.
On Thursday, a stunning statistic from Secretary of State Marco Rubio: The Trump administration has revoked the visas of more than 300 students living in the U.S. for various engagements with protests or, in Ozturk’s case, clearly protected speech.
“If you come into the U.S. as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don’t want it,” Rubio said of Ozturk on Thursday, though the 30-year-old is not accused of direct participation in any protests. “We don’t want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country.”
The implications are clear. The Trump administration is seeking to roll back the protected right to free speech for all noncitizens, legal or not, living on American soil.
Despite the arguments of many of Trumpworld’s defenders, the law is clear: A Supreme Court decision in 1945’s Bridges v Wixon ruled that the U.S. attorney general could not launch deportation proceedings against a lawful Australian permanent resident of the United States over the man’s alleged affiliation with the Communist Party.
The Court ruled explicitly in the matter: “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.”
The Bill of Rights, despite what many in MAGAworld will tell you, applies to noncitizens, too. For now.
Conservative opponents of the expansion of rights under various Supreme Court rulings have argued that this ruling was in error, but it remains on the books — at least until it’s challenged by what seems like an inevitable showdown over the rights of Mahmoud Khalil, Ozturk and others detained and effectively “disappeared” under the combined efforts of various federal agencies to police a pro-Israel narrative or sentiment among U.S. visa holders.
While the administration has yet to take this showdown to the highest court, it continues to detain foreign-born students on visas.
At the same time, the Trump administration’s dual-pronged deportation effort is taking another form: the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to target Venezuelan immigrants the federal government claims to be affiliated with the international gang Tren de Aragua.
That effort swept up at least one man with no criminal history whose lawyers say was detained and deported for having a tattoo — one for autism awareness — that an ICE official supposedly admitted had been mistaken for a gang tattoo. Another 54-year-old man spent hours at an ICE processing facility before officials noticed that he had an ID in his wallet proving his American citizenship.
Groups including the ACLU and FIRE have rallied in defense of the student visa holders, including Khalil. On Wednesday a federal appeals court sided with a lower court and the ACLU, and held in place an order halting the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act.
