Rubio's Fascist Crusade

In a few short weeks, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has revoked the visas of over 300 international students and remanded them for immediate deportation. He dusted off an obscure provision in the Immigration Nationality Act to build a dubious legal foundation for removing pro-Palestinian, anti-genocide student activists from the United States. To deport them, he has to personally assert that they are a “threat to national security.” Standing in the way of Rubio’s desire to swiftly remove them are judges who are insisting that these students be given their due process under the Constitution. There must be hearings to determine if they meet the test of this rarely-used law. It is not clear the government will grant them due process.

Rubio has said, “We don’t want people in our country that are going to be committing crimes and undermining our national security or public safety.” When Rubio revoked the visa of Turkish Fulbright Scholar, Rumeysa Ozturk, he said, “At some point I hope we run out because we’ve gotten rid of all of them. But we are looking everyday for these lunatics that are tearing things up. I encourage every country to do that, by the way, because I think it’s crazy to invite students into your country that are coming onto your campus and destabilizing it.” For the record, none of the student activists Rubio has deemed deportable are “lunatics” or “criminals,” nor do they possess the power to undermine the national security of the most powerful nation in the world, nor are they even remotely a threat to public safety. They have, it is true, been the moral and political vanguard students are wont to be. They have practiced critical thinking and a keen moral conscience, challenged the United States’ unquestioning loyalty to the apartheid, genocidal state of Israel, and nonviolently disrupted and refused to normalize a brutal status quo. What was Rumeysa Ozturk’s supposed “crime?” Co-authoring an op-ed for the Tufts University newspaper advocating for an end to the American-Israeli genocide in Gaza and urging that the university divest from corporations that are profiting from the occupation and genocide. For that act of constitutionally-protected free speech, she was abducted off a city street by masked federal agents who handcuffed her and whisked her away in an unmarked vehicle. She is currently languishing in an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, over a thousand miles away from her home in Boston.

Marco Rubio’s fascist crusade to crush the movement for solidarity with Palestine is not only targeting international students already in the United States for deportation. It is also aggressively scouring the social media accounts of new visa applicants aspiring to study in United States universities. There are reports that the State Department is using artificial intelligence to conduct keyword searches that would flag students who sympathize with the Palestinian cause or oppose the genocide in Gaza. Imagine compassion and a social conscience being a disqualification for graduate study in the United States.

In related news, the authoritarian Trump regime has mistakenly deported a Salvadorean father of three living in Maryland to the notorious super-max Terrorist Confinement prison in El Salvador. Kilmar Abregu Garcia had Temporary Protected Status which prohibited the government from deporting him. They deported him anyway. They appear to believe that the executive branch can simply declare someone “deportable” and deport them. Due process be damned. Vice President Vance, White House Spokeswoman Leavitt, and Attorney General Bondi all lied about Garcia, falsely claiming he was “a member of the brutal MS-13 gang,” and that he was engaged in “human trafficking.” His attorneys denounce this smear campaign against their client. The Trump regime invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in order to fast-track deportations. They have ignored the key provision that we must be at war with the country whose citizens we are deporting. Last I checked, we are not at war with any Central American or Latin American country. American governmental officials lie freely about their citizens, and do want to institute white, patriarchal rule in the United States, so there is a kind of undeclared war on brown people. It is clear that they want to terrify poor, desperate people in countries ravaged by poverty and gang violence. They want them to conclude that the United States is no longer a safe refuge. They want them to think gulags, not “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

The harsh and lawless treatment of Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk, and many other pro-Palestinian solidarity activists, is connected to the harsh and lawless treatment of Kilmar Abregu Garcia, and hundreds of other immigrants. The government lies about them, criminalizes them, sets up dubious legal justifications to “get rid of them,” employs authoritarian tactics to intimidate, harass, arrest, detain, and deport them. It is all designed to strike fear in the hearts of marginalized, vulnerable people, and those who stand up for them and make themselves a target. As Palestinian poet, Mohammed El-Kurd, has said, “Fascism thrives on fear. They want you to be silent, to self-censor, to do less. You will not recover whatever ground you concede…” His guidance to us all, as we work on all these fronts is: “Be unafraid. Dissent.”