Trump’s Repressive Measures Show US Imperialism Has Come Home to Roost

Part of the Series

In a Washington Post op-ed written from the LaSalle Detention Center, the Palestinian American activist and Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil described “the breakneck speed” with which an immigration judge decided that the Trump administration would be allowed to deport him. He also questioned the basis of the case against him: “Why should protesting Israel’s indiscriminate killing of thousands of innocent Palestinians result in the erosion of my constitutional rights?” Khalil wrote.

This is no rhetorical question, as other immigrant pro-Palestine activists have been targeted by the Trump administration. Two weeks after Khalil’s arrest, six masked Homeland Security agents arrested Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk. Her only “crime” appears to be coauthoring an op-ed in the university newspaper about the Gaza genocide. She was sent to the same Louisiana detention center as Khalil. Multiple judges have ruled that she should be sent to her local immigration office in Vermont to determine whether her arrest or detention were legal. A bail hearing, which could result in her release, is scheduled for May 9.

Mohsen Mahdawi, another Palestinian student-activist at Columbia who has been a lawful permanent resident since 2015, was arrested at an immigration office where he arrived to finalize his United States citizenship. A federal judge ordered Mahdawi’s release at the end of April — a move that the Trump administration is appealing. Mahdawi remains undeterred. “Never give up on the idea that justice will prevail,” he said upon his release. “We want to stand up for humanity, because the rest of the world — not only Palestine — is watching us. And what is going to happen in America is going to affect the rest of the world.”

Other immigrant activists, such as Cornell University student Momodou Taal, have left the country rather than risk deportation. “I have lost faith I could walk the streets without being abducted,” Taal wrote of his decision.

The Trump administration’s harassment of these students is part of its assault on political activism, immigration and higher education, following the Gaza solidarity encampments last spring. When it comes to universities, the Trump administration has weaponized accusations of antisemitism in an attempt to silence its critics and force institutions of higher learning into ideological conformity. Even those institutions that have caved to the administration’s demands have lost funding and cut staff or programs. Columbia University, at the center of the federal government’s multifaceted attacks, laid off 180 researchers after the Trump administration withheld or cut $650 million in funding. These cuts come after the university had agreed to the government’s demands of hiring more police, banning masks on campus, and placing the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies Department as well as the Center for Palestine Studies under receivership.

More than 1,000 international students at universities across the country had their visas unilaterally revoked by the Trump administration. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the move a national security issue, saying student visas shouldn’t be awarded to people who “hate our way of life.” Though many of them have since had their visas restored, the administration has said it will revoke the visa of anyone who is found to have violated the law — even for a speeding ticket. This move extends the attack on immigrant students to all foreign-born Americans. An April 28 executive order continues the twofold nativist frenzy of castigating immigrants as criminals and then pledging to arrest, detain and deport immigrants on any pretense. This “law and order” approach to immigration further erodes the standard mechanisms of immigration policy by involving the attorney general, secretary of Defense and secretary of Homeland Security, together with state and local law enforcement, in the process. At the same “Department of Government Efficiency” cuts have reduced the number of immigration court judges and personnel, eliminating opportunities for due process while extending the length of detention.

The Trump administration has sent at least 238 people to CECOT, the infamous prison in El Salvador, as part of a dangerous and legally questionable $6 million contract between El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele government and the Trump administration. The U.S. government has claimed it has no power to return people it has sent there, flouting a unanimous Supreme Court decision that ordered the return of Kilmar Abrego García, the 29-year-old Maryland man sent there in what the administration admitted was an “administrative error.”

To facilitate these revocations of citizenship, the Trump administration is scraping the dregs of U.S. history: In defending Khalil’s detention, it has turned to the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, a nativist bill that was used to deport leftists or deny them entry to the U.S. To justify Abrego García’s and other deportations to CECOT, the administration is going even further back, to the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. The Supreme Court has paused its use for now, though it remains to be seen whether the administration will abide by the court’s ruling or follow the ignoble precedent of nativist legislation.

Designed to intimidate and terrorize, these repressive measures are signs of the ways we in the U.S. are not immune from U.S. imperialism. More than 18 months into a genocide in Gaza that has been as much the responsibility of the U.S. as it is of Israel, the federal government is going to war against its own population.

For years, political pundits and journalists have treated U.S. foreign policy as a marginal factor in electoral outcomes and the broader state of U.S. democracy. Yet with around 750 military bases in 80 countries and at least 228,390 military personnel stationed abroad — including 168,571 active-duty troops — this assumption rests on the empire’s enduring illusions of political impunity and geographical seclusion. But those illusions are crumbling under the weight of their own contradictions, chief among them the belief that imperial might can indefinitely shield the U.S. from military, political and legal reckoning. Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine have shattered that delusion, exposing the self-deception at its core.

The dangerous attacks of the Trump administration extend the bipartisan climate of repression by which U.S. elites have responded to pro-Palestine activism. More than 3,200 people were arrested in the Gaza solidarity encampments in the spring of 2024. The attacks on pro-Palestine activists took on a fatal cast when, on September 6, 2024, the Israeli military assassinated Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, a recent graduate of the University of Washington who had traveled to the West Bank with the International Solidarity Movement.

Ezgi Eygi was my (Aria Fani’s) friend and student. I met her in autumn 2023 during a guest lecture on the film Lemon Tree. She later took my literary translation course, and our conversations on nationalism’s xenophobic violence extended beyond the classroom. These dialogues found deeper urgency in the spring of 2024, when Ezgi Eygi helped lead a student-led solidarity campaign at the University of Washington. It was in these moments of shared commitment that I came to know her not just as a student, but also as a courageous thinker and organizer.

Ezgi Eygi was a naturalized U.S. citizen; Khalil, Mahdawi and Abrego García, all permanent residents. Their stories lay bare the dire precariousness of this moment. Ezgi Eygi’s killing remains uninvestigated despite her family’s and community’s relentless pursuit of justice and accountability. To Ezgi Eygi’s community in Seattle, former President Joe Biden’s stern warning to those who target U.S. civilians abroad — “We will hunt you down and make you pay” — rings hollow. The administration refused to pressure Israel to investigate her brutal, senseless killing. In doing so, Biden and the Democratic Party gave the next administration a clear signal: It too can ignore legal norms with impunity.

The unlawful incarceration of Khalil here at home is a natural extension of Ezgi Eygi’s murder “over there.” As Khalil himself noted, his case is about more than just being a Palestinian community leader and activist; it’s about a broader crackdown. “The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent,” Khalil wrote, “visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs. In the weeks ahead, students, advocates, and elected officials must unite to defend the right to protest for Palestine. At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.”

The targeting of pro-Palestine activists is part of a larger machinery of repression that is eroding due process and criminalizing dissent through judicial warfare, military might and the prison-industrial complex. We have seen this machinery at work ensnaring environmental activists, denationalizing trans people, menacing pro-democracy activists protesting Tesla and Stop Cop City protesters, among others. Having pressured a major law firm into doing its bidding, the Trump administration is even threatening judges who refuse to align with its agenda.

Palestine is not just a place “over there” — its suffering will not be contained by borders that exist to serve U.S. imperialism and Israel’s ethnonationalist project. Gaza has made one thing clear: Americans cannot remain indefinitely immune to the consequences of U.S. imperialism.

The U.S. public, whether it realizes it or not, stands at the intersection of this grief and trauma. It must find the will not only to challenge this administration’s lawlessness and corruption but to confront the foreign policy that underpins it. Treating these as separate struggles — as has been done for far too long — is not just arbitrary but dangerously shortsighted. The current attacks, despite some fearmongering rhetoric from the government, make few distinctions between citizens, permanent residents and noncitizens. All of them, of us, are in the crosshairs of a bellicose empire intent on greed and domination.

It is a dangerous moment. But even moments of danger are opportunities to act. Our increasingly dire circumstances connect the “right here” of the United States to the “over there” of Palestine. The same urgency that compels us to demand an end to Israel’s forced starvation of Gaza and attacks on solidarity activists bringing aid also fuels our calls to protect immigrants and activists, and for universities to band together against the Trump administration’s overreach. While the administration may be less susceptible to grassroots pressure, the moment allows us to become better internationalists, rooted in mutual defense of one another regardless of nationality or citizenship status.

At Ezgi Eygi’s alma mater, the path forward for her justice-driven legacy is clear. The University of Washington is imposing harsh austerity measures that will most harm the very staff who supported Ezgi Eygi and countless others with care and mentorship. At the same time, students are demanding the university sever ties with Boeing, whose weapons fuel the ongoing genocide in Gaza. These struggles are inseparable: The fight for workers’ dignity at home is bound to the fight against war and military occupation abroad.

More than that, repression threatens our very lives. For Ezgi Eygi’s family and community in Seattle, an unfillable void remains where a radiant, magnetic and justice-minded organizer once stood. Khalil and his family will have to navigate years of trauma inflicted by the same state that still shields Ezgi Eygi’s killer. There is no denying the dangers of this moment. But there is no quarter given to it either. “I have always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear,” Khalil wrote in his March 18 statement from the detention jail, where he has been assisting other migrants caught in the maelstrom of this nativist regime. While repression aims to compel silence, solidarity demands that we continue to pursue justice.

Posted in Progressive Political News