Alireza Doroudi, an Iranian PhD student at the University of Alabama, was picked up by ICE without charge. No one will say why. He’s still gone.
https://www.facebook.com/FearAndLoathingCloserToTheEdge/posts/665054132830559
Rümeysa Öztürk was a Fulbright scholar at Tufts University. ICE agents in masks and hoodies grabbed her off the street, shoved her into an unmarked car, and vanished her into a Louisiana detention center. Her crime? Writing an op-ed critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza.
https://www.facebook.com/FearAndLoathingCloserToTheEdge/posts/665054132830559
Kseniia Petrova, a Russian scientist at Harvard, was deported over a technicality involving frog embryo samples. When she said she feared political persecution in Russia, they shrugged and shackled her anyway.
https://www.facebook.com/FearAndLoathingCloserToTheEdge/posts/665054132830559
Momodou Taal, a British-Gambian PhD student at Cornell, was told to surrender himself or be hunted. His activism cost him his place in the country. He left voluntarily. That’s what exile looks like now.
https://www.facebook.com/FearAndLoathingCloserToTheEdge/posts/665054132830559
Jessica Brösche, a German tourist, spent eight days in solitary confinement for a visa mix-up. She described her experience as a “horror film.” This is what awaits people who land on the wrong day, at the wrong airport, with the wrong stamp.
https://www.facebook.com/FearAndLoathingCloserToTheEdge/posts/665054132830559
Andry Hernández Romero, a Venezuelan asylum seeker, was deported for having religious tattoos that DHS claimed were gang-related. He came here to escape persecution. We handed him over to it.
https://www.facebook.com/FearAndLoathingCloserToTheEdge/posts/665054132830559
Francisco García Casique, a barber from Venezuela, was seen in a propaganda video — chained and frog-marched into El Salvador’s mega-prison system. That’s how his family found out where he was.
https://www.facebook.com/FearAndLoathingCloserToTheEdge/posts/665054132830559
Jerce Reyes Barrios, a Venezuelan footballer, was deported because ICE misread his Real Madrid tattoo as gang ink. They sent him to a Salvadoran prison. No charges. No gang ties. Just ink.
https://www.facebook.com/FearAndLoathingCloserToTheEdge/posts/665054132830559
Felipe Zapata Velásquez, a University of Florida student, was arrested for a traffic offense and deported to Colombia. ICE called it routine. His family called it trauma.
https://www.facebook.com/FearAndLoathingCloserToTheEdge/posts/665054132830559
Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil’s attorneys were stunned when an immigration judge in Jena, Louisiana, announced this week that she would rule on whether he should be deported on Friday — three days after his initial court appearance.
“That is, in my opinion, contrary to every notion of due process,” Marc Van Der Hout, one of his attorneys, told reporters Thursday.
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Though they remain detained in Louisiana as their immigration court proceedings move forward, Khalil and Ozturk successfully blocked the Trump administration’s attempts to establish federal court jurisdiction in that state. Their attorneys argued that the government secretly arrested the scholars and shuttled them between locations without public disclosure to make it more difficult for them to file habeas corpus petitions in courts closer to home.
A federal judge in New York ruled last month that Khalil’s lawsuit alleging the government violated his constitutional rights to free speech should take place in New Jersey, where he was briefly held before being transferred. His attorneys said that even if the immigration judge in Louisiana rules he can be deported, his federal court challenge could stop his removal if they are victorious.
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The administration’s strategy “is to isolate the individuals from their communities, their legal support, their families, in hopes that media attention and mobilization around their cases dies down,” said Ramzi Kassem, co-director at CLEAR, a legal nonprofit and clinic at City University of New York that is representing Khalil and Ozturk.
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The unusual aspect of the Trump administration’s approach, Sandweg said, is how quickly federal authorities relocated the university scholars. Detainee transfers can take up to two weeks, he said, but the Trump administration moved them within days.
Pointing to Khalil’s case, Sandweg said it raises “very complicated questions of the First Amendment. If you know this case is headed to the courts well in advance, the speed in which he was taken to Louisiana so quickly is unusual. That means they were thinking about those legal issues before the operation and had a plan to get him on the plane to Louisiana.”
