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In recent weeks, the Trump Administration has intensified its crackdown on foreigners inside the United States, with\u00a0tourists<\/a>, green card holders, and even U.S. citizens<\/a> caught up in the operations. Academics and students linked to the pro-Palestine movement have become prime targets of the administration. Last month, U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested several of these individuals, including Badar Khan Suri, a fellow at Georgetown University who was arrested<\/a> in front of his family, and R\u00fcmeysa \u00d6zt\u00fcrk, a Tufts University PhD student who was ambushed<\/a> in the middle of the street.\u00a0<\/p>\n The first reported detention of a foreign activist took place on March 8, when ICE agents arrested Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil in front of his pregnant U.S. citizen wife, Noor Abdalla. Khalil, a legal U.S. permanent resident, previously served as a negotiator on behalf of the Palestine solidarity protest movement at Columbia University, where he finished his graduate studies in December. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has since accused him<\/a> of leading \u201cactivities aligned to Hamas,\u201d but he has not been charged with a crime. Though a judge has paused<\/a> his deportation, Khalil\u2019s arrest led to a nationwide explosion<\/a> of protest<\/a> and outrage over what many see as a violation of free speech and protest rights that could have wider implications.\u00a0<\/p>\n In her first media interview<\/a> after Kahlil\u2019s arrest, Abdalla told Reuters she\u2019d tried to assure Khalil that as a green card holder, he\u2019d be safe. \u201cClearly, I was naive,\u201d she said. The couple reportedly met in Lebanon in 2016, and were married in New York two years ago. The article was published alongside photos of an eight-months-pregnant Abdalla holding a framed photo from their wedding and an ultrasound image of the couple\u2019s unborn child.<\/p>\n \u201cIt would be very devastating for me and for him to meet his first child behind a glass screen,\u201d Abdalla told Reuters. \u201cI\u2019ve always been so excited to have my first baby with the person I love.\u201d Abdalla reportedly ended the interview when she saw Khalil was calling her from the detention center in Jena, Louisiana, where he has been held<\/a> for nearly a month.\u00a0<\/p>\n After reading the details of Khalil\u2019s arrest, I could not stop thinking of Abdalla and crying\u2014though now there are many more people in her situation, including Badar Khan Suri\u2019s wife, Mapheze Saleh, and their three children, and the families of the other migrants who have been affected so far. Like most of my fellow U.S.-born Americans, I have not lived through anything like what Abdalla and others experienced on U.S. soil, but we do have at least one thing in common: eight years ago, my now former husband was arrested in front of me in our apartment in Istanbul, Turkey.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n It was October 2017, and my then-husband had just stumbled in from an exhausting twelve-hour shift at the bar where he worked. I opened my eyes just long enough to watch him flop into bed, and I rolled over to throw an arm around him before falling back to sleep. At the time, Turkey was under a state of emergency imposed<\/a> by the government after a failed coup attempt in July 2016. Turkey accused an Islamist group affiliated with preacher Fethullah G\u00fclen of planning the uprising, and it launched a crackdown on those connected to the G\u00fclenists, which Turkey considers a terror group. But many other opposition figures and dissidents were soon caught up in the authoritarian repression, from politicians to activists and journalists. The state of emergency would ultimately last two years, and according to an estimate by the U.S. State Department, resulted in more than 300,000 arrests<\/a>. I didn\u2019t know my little family would soon be one of those affected.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n A few months before my ex\u2019s arrest, we\u2019d booked a trip to Tbilisi, Georgia. The morning of our trip, we were running late for our flight, so when they sent us from the ticketing counter to an office in the back of Istanbul\u2019s Sabiha G\u00f6k\u00e7en Airport, I was convinced we\u2019d miss our plane. Turns out, I needn\u2019t have worried: My then-husband didn\u2019t have permission to leave the country. The agents didn\u2019t know why, so we waited for our bags to be returned before going back home to call a lawyer. After weeks passed with no news, my then-husband appeared to have all but forgotten about it\u2014which should tell you something about how unremarkable the incident was for someone who\u2019d been born in Turkey, where repression against minorities, migrants and opposition members is commonplace.<\/p>\n But I wasn\u2019t used to living in constant fear. I knew that while Turkey was still under a state of emergency, almost anything could happen. And I knew that unlike my ex and my friends, I could leave, but no one could have torn me away from my newlywed happiness.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the weeks between the incident at the airport and my ex\u2019s arrest, I kept seeing an image of a poster of the Argentine tango composer Carlos Gardel in my head. Everywhere I went, Carlos was with me, smiling, the little devil on my shoulder. Only later did I realize it was a still from a film I\u2019d seen years before about the arrests of dissidents during the 1970s military dictatorship in Argentina. In the film, the poster is shown on the door of an apartment as military police break it down to arrest someone inside. I tried to convince my then-husband that we should go stay with friends for a while. He refused. \u201cIt\u2019ll be fine,\u201d he\u2019d tell me. But with no information about why his passport had been cancelled, my mind strayed to the disappearances<\/a> of dissidents in Turkey during the 1980s and 90s, dreaming up the worst possible scenarios\u2013as I imagine the families of foreign activists may be doing in the U.S. today.\u00a0<\/p>\n So when the sounds of yelling and banging woke me up again that night in October 2017, I felt in my gut that it was the police. I tried to wake my then-husband, but he hadn\u2019t heard anything. \u201cIt was in your dream,\u201d he said without opening his eyes. I waited for a few seconds and\u2014nothing. I almost settled back into bed. But then the banging came again. \u201cGet up, hey, get up,\u201d I said, trying and failing not to panic. \u201cGet up! Please, call your lawyer!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n It was too late. The police had broken open our front door, and I heard them running down the hall, before barging into the empty bedroom across from ours. He tried to stop them from crashing into our room, just so I could pull on a shirt. At least five masked police pushed through, shoved him to the ground, and started kicking. They were all armed with rifles. \u201cStop hitting him!\u201d I screamed, but they pushed me down, too, and pointed their guns at our heads. We grasped hands, but one of the cops kicked them apart with his filthy boot.\u00a0<\/p>\n The other masked police rifled through our clothes and books, as their colleagues kept us at gunpoint on the floor of our own bedroom. They wouldn\u2019t show us their badges, and as in Khalil\u2019s case, they wouldn\u2019t show us a warrant. Much like what happened to Abdalla, they threatened me with arrest, until they realized I was a Westerner. \u201cThere\u2019s some woman with him; she has a U.S. passport,\u201d one officer said into his cellphone, his ears drooping like a scolded dog after his boss told him not to arrest me.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ultimately, we learned that my then-husband\u2014who is a longtime atheist and was still tipsy after his shift at the time of his detention\u2014had been arrested in supposed association with the Islamist group that Turkey accused of the coup attempt. The leader of that group lived in Pennsylvania, meaning that as a U.S. citizen, I was a liability to my then-husband\u2019s case. But we were lucky. After several weeks, his lawyer learned he\u2019d been arrested for allegedly downloading an app that had been used by the accused coup plotters. I scoured every device in our flat for evidence and came up with nothing. Three months later, after his blurred photo appeared in news reports accusing him of being a right-wing and<\/em> leftist \u201cterrorist,\u201d we learned that was because there was nothing<\/em>\u2014he was released after the government determined the G\u00fclenists had planted the app on hundreds of random Turkish SIM cards.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Khalil and Abdalla, as well as other young couples, are living through something much worse than my family did: My former husband is a citizen of Turkey, and with the help of a lawyer, we were able to track down his whereabouts the afternoon after his arrest. He was not in danger of being sent to a different country, though at the time of his release, he still hadn\u2019t even had a proper day in court. But there are some major and unsettling similarities in their cases, as well as the political contexts from which they emerged.\u00a0<\/p>\n Any student of history knows the United States has never been the democracy it claims to be. But Khalil, who was born in Syria to Palestinian refugee parents, has had to evade repression by the Assad regime only to then be detained in the \u201cLand of the Free\u201d for exercising his rights\u2014like thousands have been in Syria<\/a> and Israel<\/a>. Should the Trump Administration\u2019s attempt to deport him prove successful , he could be sent to Algeria, where he is a citizen but does not appear to have spent much of his life.\u00a0<\/p>\n Maybe Khalil\u2019s case should not be surprising. In the United States, our collective hands have always been stained with blood. I do not want to suggest that what I witnessed in Turkey has never happened here, or that Trump\u2019s crackdown on noncitizen activists is unique in our history. Black Americans, migrants, Indigenous peoples, those living in poorer nations\u2014they have always had to fear U.S. power and the violent repression it brings. Inside our borders, state violence has criminalized working communities, especially those of color. And social movements have always been the target of repression, from the destruction of the union movement, to the Palmer Raids that removed foreign dissidents from our country, to the assassinations of prominent activists during the 1960s.\u00a0<\/p>\n Regardless of that history, it seems clear political realities in the U.S. are shifting. The targeting of noncitizen activists\u2014of a certain kind of political dissent\u2014shows no signs of slowing, and it will impact the morale of the people who care about and work alongside them. Because in my experience, watching the person you love most dragged away and being powerless to help them breaks something inside of you that I can\u2019t put into words, something that can never be repaired. Judging from Abdalla\u2019s expression in those Reuters photos, I\u2019d venture to say she may have felt something similar.<\/p>\n It\u2019s been more than seven years, and I\u2019m pushing away flashbacks of the stomping of police boots in my Istanbul hallway as I write this. I was lucky to have had support from friends in Turkey throughout my ex\u2019s imprisonment. They were incredibly strong and resilient\u2014I envied them that\u2014but also in a way resigned to their reality. Many seemed confused by how upset I was, that I couldn\u2019t sleep or eat, taken aback by my awkward outpourings of emotion. For many of them, his arrest was not shocking. Some had witnessed such repression, that I remember thinking it had left them unable to feel everything. \u201cBuras\u0131 T\u00fcrkiye,\u201d they would tell me as an explanation for their attitudes\u2014\u201cThis is Turkey.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n By forcing people to become numb in order to carry on with their lives in the midst of overwhelming pain and sadness, that\u2019s what authoritarianism can take away: The ability to mourn, to feel, to connect with that which ties us to life and gives us hope to persist, hope that our reality can still change. And that\u2019s not something we can ever afford to lose.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In recent weeks, the Trump Administration has intensified its crackdown on foreigners inside the United States, with\u00a0tourists, green card holders, and even U.S. citizens caught up in the operations. Academics and students linked to the pro-Palestine movement have become prime targets of the administration. Last month, U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested several […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":177633,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12022],"tags":[16931,11488,70385,16930,428,70384,58126,5109,13348,17267],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-177631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-activist","tag-activism-dissent","tag-cost","tag-crackdowns","tag-dispatches","tag-ice","tag-mahmoud-khalil","tag-nyki-duda","tag-palestine","tag-political","tag-unseen"],"yoast_head":"\n