Masha Gessen writes:

“It’s the unmarked cars,” a friend who grew up under an Argentine dictatorship said. He had watched the video of the Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil’s abduction. In the video, which Khalil’s wife recorded, she asks for the names of the men in plainclothes who handcuffed her husband.

“We don’t give our name,” one responds. “Can you please specify what agency is taking him?” she pleads. No response. We know now that Khalil was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security.

Those of us who have lived in countries terrorized by a secret police force can’t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity. “I never realized until this moment how much fear I carried with me from my childhood in Communist Romania,” another friend, the literary scholar Marianne Hirsch, told me. “Arrests were arbitrary and every time the doorbell rang, I started to shiver.”

It’s the catastrophic interruption of daily life, as when a Tufts University graduate student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was grabbed on a suburban street by half a dozen plainclothes agents, most of them masked. The security camera video of that arrest shows Ozturk walking, looking at her phone, perhaps to check the address where she was supposed to meet her friends for dinner that night, when an agent appears in front of her. She says something — asks something — struggling to control her voice, and within seconds she is handcuffed and placed in an unmarked car.

It’s the forced mass transports of immigrants. These are not even deportations, in the way we typically think of them. Rather than being sent to their country of origin, Venezuelans were sent to El Salvador, where they are being imprisoned, indefinitely, without due process. It’s the sight of men being marched in formation, their heads shaved, hundreds of people yanked from their individual lives to be reduced to an undifferentiated mass. It’s the sight, days later, of the secretary of homeland security posing against the background of men in cages and threatening more people with the same punishment.

It’s the growing irrelevance of the law and the helplessness of judges and lawyers. A federal judge ordered flights carrying the Venezuelan men to be turned around and demanded information about the abductees. Another federal judge forbade the government to deport, without notice, Rasha Alawieh, the Brown University medical school professor who was detained on return from a trip to Lebanon. Another judge prohibited moving Rumeysa Ozturk from Massachusetts without notice. The executive branch apparently ignored these rulings.

It’s the chilling stories that come by word of mouth. ICE is checking documents on the subway. ICE is outside New York public libraries that hold English-as-a-second-language classes. ICE agents handcuffed a U.S. citizen who tried to intervene in a detention in Harlem. ICE vehicles are parked outside Columbia. ICE is coming to your workplace, your street, your building. ICE agents are wearing brown uniforms that resemble those of UPS — don’t open the door for deliveries. Don’t leave the house. The streets in the New York neighborhoods with the highest immigrant populations have emptied out. [Continue reading…]