Last week, the United States admitted it had wrongfully deported 29-year-old Salvadoran citizen Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who has now joined the burgeoning population of El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), which specialises in terrorising confined people. Married to a US citizen and the father of a five-year-old autistic child, Abrego Garcia arrived in the US more than a decade ago after fleeing gang violence at home.
The CECOT is the pride and joy of Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s self-proclaimed “coolest dictator in the world”, who delights in posting extravagant Hollywood-worthy videos of the sadistic reception and internment of the deportee “terrorists” that the Donald Trump administration is now funneling to El Salvador. Abrego Garcia is one of hundreds of new such additions to the CECOT facility – where it appears he may remain, despite the administration’s full acknowledgement that his deportation transpired “because of an administrative error”.
When the judge overseeing the case of the wrongful deportation determined that Trump and company must return Abrego Garcia to the US, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt snapped: “We suggest the Judge contact President Bukele because we are unaware of the judge having jurisdiction or authority over the country of El Salvador.”
Admission of error notwithstanding, US officials have continued to insist that Abrego Garcia is a member of the MS-13 gang, with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin asserting that “we have intelligence reports that he is involved in human trafficking.” This, to be sure, is a curious choice of words coming from the guys currently presiding over the illegal forced transport of human beings across international borders.
And yet the mass abductions to El Salvador are but one of the methods the Trump administration is relying on to sow fear nationwide. The leaders of the so-called “land of the free” have also been kidnapping international scholars and students left and right, with the aim of silencing criticism of Israel and stamping out solidarity with the Palestinian victims of the ongoing US-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip.
Officially, more than 50,000 Palestinians have been slaughtered since October 2023; since Israel broke the ceasefire in March, the United Nations reports that at least 100 children have been killed or injured in Gaza daily. In the eyes of the US, however, none of this is a crime. The only crime is to oppose genocide.
To that end, the US government has set about disappearing people like Rumeysa Ozturk, a 30-year-old Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University in Massachusetts. A Fulbright scholar studying childhood development, Ozturk was accosted on March 25 by six plainclothes officers – some of them masked – as she walked to an iftar dinner. Visibly terrified, Ozturk was handcuffed and forced into an unmarked van. Her whereabouts were unknown for nearly a full day, when her lawyers discovered that she had been flown halfway across the country to a Louisiana detention centre operated by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Ozturk was in the US on a valid student visa. Her sole transgression appears to be having co-written, in March 2024, an opinion piece for The Tufts Daily urging the university to comply with resolutions passed by the Tufts Community Union Senate, including the demand that the university recognise the genocide in Palestine and divest from companies with ties to Israel. The article had four other co-authors and was endorsed by 32 graduate students from the Tufts School of Engineering and School of Arts and Sciences.
In the DHS version of events provided by McLaughlin, Ozturk was “engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans”. No matter the fact that far more Americans have been killed by US police than by Hamas – or that Hamas are not the ones currently perpetrating a genocide. Ozturk’s visa has now been revoked.
Why, though, the need for such a sensational abduction befitting the capture of a heavily armed assassin? For one thing, it hastens the slippery slope into what is already a near-total dystopia – where dissent is rapidly being criminalised and folks are having to choose between speaking the truth and being kidnapped by the state. The official assault on freedoms of speech and thought is also a means of eliminating the right to personal integrity and asserting government control over human bodies.
Among the numerous other recent victims of Trump’s secret police operations is Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian former graduate student at Columbia University and a green card holder who was a key participant in campus protests against the genocide. On March 8, Khalil was abducted from his New York City apartment in front of his US citizen wife, who was eight months pregnant at the time, and sent to Louisiana. The following day, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced in response to Khalil’s arrest: “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”
As The Associated Press notes, the Trump administration has “cited a seldom-invoked statute authorizing the secretary of state to expel noncitizens from the country if their presence was a threat to US foreign policy interests”. And since US foreign policy interests include showering Israel with billions of dollars in aid and weaponry for the purpose of committing mass slaughter, it apparently follows that the Mahmoud Khalils of the world must be disappeared.
The list of academic victims goes on. There’s 37-year-old Columbia graduate student Ranjani Srinivasan, a doctoral candidate in urban planning, whose student visa was revoked on March 5 and who in panic opted to “self-deport” to India – as DHS Secretary Kristi Noem put it in her celebration of the departure of “one of the Columbia University terrorist sympathisers”. In this case, again, it seems Srinivasan’s crime was to have posted content critical of Israel on social media.
Then there’s Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral researcher at Georgetown University, who was snatched by masked agents outside his home in Virginia and is currently being held at an ICE facility in Texas. There is 21-year-old Columbia student Yunseo Chung, a Korean-born permanent resident of the US who has lived in the country since she was seven and was arrested for attending a pro-Palestine protest at Manhattan’s Barnard College, after which her lawful permanent resident status was revoked and she was threatened with deportation.
There is Iranian national Alireza Doroudi, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering at the University of Alabama. There is Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese kidney transplant specialist and professor at Brown University in Rhode Island, who was deported in March following a visit to family in Lebanon. And there is Momodou Taal, a British Gambian PhD student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who entered the Trumpian crosshairs after suing the administration over the crackdown on pro-Palestine activity.
Facing deportation, Taal announced on March 31 that he would be departing the country of his own accord: “I have lost faith I could walk the streets without being abducted.”
Indeed, the constant fear of abduction can be just as psychologically traumatising as the act itself. But as Trump expands his xenophobic assault to include not just undocumented people but also visa holders and legal US residents, it’s worth recalling that his predecessor Joe Biden helped set the stage for the current sociopathic spectacle with his crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protests – not to mention his own gargantuan share of deportations.
Now, the US is in all-out kidnapping mode – and it’s only a matter of time before we find out just who else is deemed to be a “threat to US foreign policy interests”.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.