Arwa Mahdawi
Let’s play a fun game of Will This Get Me Deported? The first contestant is myself: a British-Palestinian green card holder in the US. I’ll start by quoting some recent news items concerning Israel. I don’t have the space to list every atrocity that the US ally has been accused of in the past few weeks so, unlike certain trigger-happy soldiers, I’ll restrict myself to two bullet points.
“Israeli soldiers and settlers are using gendered violence and sexual assault and harassment to force Palestinians from their homes in the occupied West Bank, human rights and legal experts say.” (The Guardian; 21 April)
“Israeli forces shot and killed a young female student on Thursday while she was attending a class held in a tent in the town of Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip … third-grade student Ritaj Rihan was hit by a bullet in front of her classmates.” (Reuters; 9 April)
There should be nothing particularly controversial about discussing the above. Just as there should be nothing controversial about discussing the role of the United Arab Emirates (also a US ally) in the Sudan genocide. Or Saudi Arabia (another delightful US ally) executing a journalist. However, it would seem that criticism of violent foreign regimes is not treated equally. New evidence suggests that US immigration officers are scrutinizing green card applicants’ social media for wrongthink, with a key focus being criticism of Israel.
Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that updated guidelines issued by the Trump administration mean immigrants could potentially be denied a green card for expressing anti-American or anti-Israeli political opinions. Immigration officers (or homeland defenders as they are now known) have been told to elevate all cases involving “potential anti-American and/or antisemitic conduct or ideology” to their managers and to the agency’s general counsel’s office for review. Antisemitism, of course, should never be tolerated. The Trump administration, however, appears to be aggressively redefining the word to include legitimate criticism of the Israeli government.
One example cited by the New York Times of speech that could cause problems with obtaining a green card, for example, is a social media post that says: “Stop Israeli Terror in Palestine” and shows the Israeli flag crossed out. Participating in pro-Palestinian protests would also count against you.
Also alarming is the new guidance around “anti-American” ideology. Again, this seems to be defined broadly, but a few examples are given. Burning a US flag, for example, is citied as something that would be a red mark. The internal documents explicitly state that someone “holding a sign advocating overthrow of the U.S. government” (which might very well be interpreted as someone with a peaceful sign at a No Kings protest) would also be problematic.
While this guidance obviously raises free speech issues, it certainly makes a lot more sense to police people’s opinions of your own country than it does to punish criticism of a completely different country.
Perhaps what’s most depressing about this new reporting is how unsurprising it is. It is not exactly breaking news that the Trump administration wants to crush speech critical of both itself and Israel. Melania Trump, for example, is currently demanding that ABC punish Jimmy Kimmel for joking about her having the glow of an “expectant widow”. And it has been widely documented that the Trump administration has been working in conjunction with anti-Palestinian groups such as Canary Mission and Betar to identify students it can detain and deport for criticizing Israel.
These include Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk, who made headlines last year when she was snatched off the streets of by masked immigration officers and detained for the “crime” of co-writing a pro-Palestinian op-ed in a student newspaper. You can read that op-ed here. It talks about credible accusations against Israel of “deliberate starvation and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide”. It contains nothing more inflammatory than the two news reports I cited at the start of this op-ed.
Still, while it might not be new news that the Trump administration is out to punish criticism of Israel, these new green card guidelines are yet another alarming escalation in the war on free speech in the US. And they should concern everyone, no matter their views on Israel. Because, believe me, the Trump administration is not going to stop with criticism of Israel. This crackdown on dissent, as numerous experts have warned, will only grow broader.
“The Supreme Court has recognized for 80 years that noncitizens residing in this country have First Amendment rights, including the right not to be discriminated against for your beliefs,” Brian Hauss, deputy director at the ACLU told me in a statement. “While the administration currently seeks to penalize flag desecration or speech about Israel-Palestine, there is no telling what political opinions it will try to censor in the future. We should all be concerned about the government’s abuse of the immigration system to suppress dissent.”
We certainly should. Particularly as it seems the government’s efforts to shut people up are working. Recent data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire) found that at hyper-liberal schools, where the average student is strongly liberal, “every issue is easy for liberal students to discuss — except for one: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”.
And that’s hardly a surprise, is it? Watching people like Öztürk, who was in the US on a student visa, get thrown in a detention centre for a middle-of-the-road op-ed is going to stop other students in precarious immigration situations from voicing their opinions.
Watching the Trump administration try and deport a green card holder like Mahmoud Khalil for pro-Palestinian advocacy is going to stop other permanent residents from raising their voices. And it won’t stop with immigrants: this sort of highly publicized policing of political opinions has a chilling effect on the speech of citizens. When one group of people are too scared to talk about an issue it creates a “spiral of silence” which means even more people self-censor.
How do we counter this spiral of silence? By never shutting up; particularly when we are buffered by privilege. Most of us don’t have the power to buy media companies and control their output, the way that Trump’s billionaire friends do. Most of us don’t have the ability to donate millions to politicians to influence foreign policy. But many of us do have the power to speak up; Trump hasn’t fully taken away our ability to exercise our first amendment rights yet. But here’s the thing: he won’t ever have to, if we are all too afraid to use them.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist
