Donald Trump and his administration are carrying out the broadest assault on the rights held by those in the country on visas in decades.
Democrats risk being left in the dust.
Tuesday evening marked the latest incident in which a foreign student on a visa in the United States was snatched up by plainclothes federal agents who refused to show identification or other documents to bystanders or the student herself. As with previous cases, the student — Rumeysa Ozturk — appears to have been shipped across the country with the apparent goal of putting her case before a conservative court, having been targeted for the publication of an op-ed critical of the Israeli assault on Gaza.
On Thursday, a stunning statistic from Secretary of State Marco Rubio: The Trump administration has revoked the visas of more than 300 students living in the U.S. for various engagements with protests or, in Ozturk’s case, clearly protected speech.
“If you come into the U.S. as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don’t want it,” Rubio said of Ozturk on Thursday, though the 30-year-old is not accused of direct participation in any protests. “We don’t want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country.”
The implications are clear. The Trump administration is seeking to roll back the protected right to free speech for all noncitizens, legal or not, living on American soil.
Despite the arguments of many of Trumpworld’s defenders, the law is clear: A Supreme Court decision in 1945’s Bridges v Wixon ruled that the U.S. attorney general could not launch deportation proceedings against a lawful Australian permanent resident of the United States over the man’s alleged affiliation with the Communist Party.
The Court ruled explicitly in the matter: “Once an alien lawfully enters and resides in this country he becomes invested with the rights guaranteed by the Constitution to all people within our borders. Such rights include those protected by the First and Fifth Amendments and by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
The Bill of Rights, despite what many in MAGAworld will tell you, applies to noncitizens, too. For now.
Conservative opponents of the expansion of rights under various Supreme Court rulings have argued that this ruling was in error, but it remains on the books — at least until it’s challenged by what seems like an inevitable showdown over the rights of Mahmoud Khalil, Ozturk and others detained and effectively “disappeared” under the combined efforts of various federal agencies to police a pro-Israel narrative or sentiment among U.S. visa holders.
While the administration has yet to take this showdown to the highest court, it continues to detain foreign-born students on visas.
At the same time, the Trump administration’s dual-pronged deportation effort is taking another form: the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to target Venezuelan immigrants the federal government claims to be affiliated with the international gang Tren de Aragua.
That effort swept up at least one man with no criminal history whose lawyers say was detained and deported for having a tattoo — one for autism awareness — that an ICE official supposedly admitted had been mistaken for a gang tattoo. Another 54-year-old man spent hours at an ICE processing facility before officials noticed that he had an ID in his wallet proving his American citizenship.
Groups including the ACLU and FIRE have rallied in defense of the student visa holders, including Khalil. On Wednesday a federal appeals court sided with a lower court and the ACLU, and held in place an order halting the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act.
So where are the Democrats?
Leaders of the opposition party have yet to present a unified front on any issue. Most recently they became consumed by infighting and intra-party sniping over the strategic collapse of the party’s resistance to a short-term funding bill.
The continued aversion of politicians outside of the party’s progressive wing to challenge pro-Israel interests also makes vocal pushback against the move to cancel visas more politically perilous. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have been virtually silent about the targeting of student activists, leaving rank-and-file to chart their own course.
A handful of Democratic leaders spoke to The Independent on Thursday about whether their party was being left behind by a fast-moving assault on the constitutional rights of legal-resident noncitizens.
“That’s what the case in Judge Boasberg’s courtroom is all about. He ordered that the plane [with Venezuelan deportees] be turned around, but they defied his authority,” said Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin. “But it obviously is a problem, as they’re trying to move fast and break things, including the Constitution.”
Illinois Rep. Delia Ramirez urged her fellow Democrats to get louder about the issue.
“I think that the role that we play is more important than ever in calling them out for all the things that they’re doing that are not constitutional, that are illegal, that are crimes, and that, in essence, is trafficking people outside of this country without due process,” she said.
There’s little Democrats can do to directly influence or halt the second Trump administration’s full-tilt deportation strategy — either to dissuade the targeting of students for protected political beliefs or temper the desire of the president to see deportation numbers skyrocket.
What the party can do, however, is present itself like an actual opposition — and serve as a political front for the voices in America standing up for established constitutional precedent.
