In 1982, the filmmaker Costa-Gavras’s film Missing was released to wide acclaim. The plot concerns an American citizen Ed Horman (Jack Lemmon) looking for his son, a journalist who has gone missing in Chile. He is joined in his search by his daughter-in-law, Beth (Sissy Spacek). The two unite, despite their initial political differences, as they desperately hunt for a beloved son and husband. It is not a cheerful story—you can guess how it ends (in a thinly-veiled film about the Chilean coup of 1973)—but a devastating one. I cannot recall the last time I saw it, but I remember it as one of many such films about the dangers of life in “other” countries, the kind dismissed as tinpot dictatorships. Costa-Gavras, being Costa-Gavras, handles the subject with nuance and clarity, but there were at the time several others that were far more ham-fisted and stereotypical: with scary, rapist Latin men drooling over fragile white women, evil dictators running their countries into the ground while brave white Americans showed up to rescue the natives, and so on. The theme and the message were always the same, with different iterations: there are these places where people disappear in the dark of night or the light of day, everyone around them is helpless to act, and democracy never existed. Other places.
Only two days ago, Rumeysa Ozturk, 30, a doctoral student at Tufts University, was making her way to friends to break her Ramadan fast, when a group of people in plainclothes and masks approached her, placed her in handcuffs, and led her to a dark, unmarked car. In video captured by an onlooker, Michael Mathis, Ozturk can be seen and heard crying out in bewilderment, her backpack taken from her, and rushed into the parked vehicle. According to Al Jazeera, her lawyer filed a lawsuit on her behalf arguing that she was unlawfully detained, “prompting US District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston that night to order US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) not to move Ozturk out of Massachusetts without at least 48 hours notice.”
Despite the judge’s order, Ozturk was removed to Louisiana. The sequence of events resembles what happened to Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate who was similarly apprehended and taken to the same state (away from more sympathetic authorities on the east coast). On the morning of March 27, Alireza Doroudi, 22, “an Iranian citizen getting his Phd in mechanical engineering, was abducted early Tuesday morning from his off-campus home at The University of Alabama,” according to a report from Dave Zirin.
In each case, the person kidnapped—the only word for what happened to them—was legally entitled to be here, but saw their legality simply stripped away. Ozturk, for instance, was here on an F-1 student visa, but that has apparently been declared null and void. Khalil is a green card holder married to an American citizen, but his right to due process (available to anyone in the U.S) has been denied. Doroudi is here as a student and, like the others, also has a right to due process. In his case, there have been no reasons given for his abduction—his crime appears to simply be that he is Iranian; he was taken at 5:30 a.m. Ozturk has apparently been singled out for co-authoring an op-ed calling for divestment from Israel, and Khalil for organising pro-Palestine protests.
None of that really matters: the issue is not whether or not they are legal, but what is being done to them. Following the sequence of these arrests, from Khalil on, we can see that the rationales for the kidnappings are becoming much less tenuous. In ordering these roundups, Donald Trump is invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (already challenged in courts), determined to be seen as following through on his promises to get migrants out of the country and to rid campuses of what his administration describes as a giant wave of anti-semitism. Everywhere on campuses, students—including permanent residents—are being rounded up and incarcerated.
This has been the reality for many immigrants for decades now: unseen, invisible day workers in cities like Chicago, without papers, have long been subject to unstable, dangerous working conditions and the constant threat of raids and deportations. In workplaces across the country, masses of people have lived in fear of being uprooted at any given moment. And they have done so without the support of crowds rallying around them for support.
To be clear and fair: students and organisers bravely agitating for the release of people like Ozturk are not unaware of the larger issues around what is happening to their colleagues, as is clear in a Democracy Now episode, where rally participants make a point of emphasising that non-academic immigrants have long experienced such instability and danger.
These abductions establish nothing but a widening sense of terror within communities, but the time has finally come for us all to acknowledge that millions have lived in fear for decades, even more so under Democratic administrations. The Clinton co-presidency created a massive pool of undocumented people, with their changes to immigration legislation in the 1990s, along with the North American Free Trade Agreement—which in turn created the unstable economic conditions that compelled people to move across borders. Worldwide, we are seeing a dystopian push to criminalise and expel migrants and simultaneously deploy them as underpaid, cheap labour, all while barring them from the benefits of citizenship. This has been most evident in places like Dubai, where migrant workers create the towering skyscrapers that win architectural awards but literally lose their lives in doing so.
We live in a time of terror. We can, if we choose, speak and write of resistance and liberation, and such things are always possible. But terror has a way of slowly seeping into the lifeblood of the world. For decades, we have ignored the terror that lay quietly unseen, like a resting crocodile at the bottom of a silty river, affecting only the faceless masses that did all the unseen work in restaurants and hospitals. Now, a beast emerges slowly into the light of day: black-masked agents of the state whisk people away in broad daylight. Today, they take away those who call for a free Palestine. Tomorrow, they will target those who call for abortion rights, and the day after that, opinion columnists, and on and on.
How will we respond to terror when it arises in our midst?
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See also:
First They Came for the Criminals
On Immigrants, Criminality, and Changing the Narrative
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