SWinxy (CC BY 4.0)
Columbia University students and others gather in New York City to protest the March 8 arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil.
In recent weeks, the Trump Administration has intensified its crackdown on foreigners inside the United States, with tourists, 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 of these individuals, including Badar Khan Suri, a fellow at Georgetown University who was arrested in front of his family, and Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University PhD student who was ambushed in the middle of the street.
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 of leading “activities aligned to Hamas,” but he has not been charged with a crime. Though a judge has paused his deportation, Khalil’s arrest led to a nationwide explosion of protest and outrage over what many see as a violation of free speech and protest rights that could have wider implications.
In her first media interview after Kahlil’s arrest, Abdalla told Reuters she’d tried to assure Khalil that as a green card holder, he’d be safe. “Clearly, I was naive,” 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’s unborn child.
“It would be very devastating for me and for him to meet his first child behind a glass screen,” Abdalla told Reuters. “I’ve always been so excited to have my first baby with the person I love.” Abdalla reportedly ended the interview when she saw Khalil was calling her from the detention center in Jena, Louisiana, where he has been held for nearly a month.
After reading the details of Khalil’s arrest, I could not stop thinking of Abdalla and crying—though now there are many more people in her situation, including Badar Khan Suri’s 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.
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 by the government after a failed coup attempt in July 2016. Turkey accused an Islamist group affiliated with preacher Fethullah Gülen of planning the uprising, and it launched a crackdown on those connected to the Gülenists, 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. I didn’t know my little family would soon be one of those affected.
A few months before my ex’s arrest, we’d 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’s Sabiha Gökçen Airport, I was convinced we’d miss our plane. Turns out, I needn’t have worried: My then-husband didn’t have permission to leave the country. The agents didn’t 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—which should tell you something about how unremarkable the incident was for someone who’d been born in Turkey, where repression against minorities, migrants and opposition members is commonplace.
But I wasn’t 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.
In the weeks between the incident at the airport and my ex’s 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’d 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. “It’ll be fine,” he’d tell me. But with no information about why his passport had been cancelled, my mind strayed to the disappearances of dissidents in Turkey during the 1980s and 90s, dreaming up the worst possible scenarios–as I imagine the families of foreign activists may be doing in the U.S. today.
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’t heard anything. “It was in your dream,” he said without opening his eyes. I waited for a few seconds and—nothing. I almost settled back into bed. But then the banging came again. “Get up, hey, get up,” I said, trying and failing not to panic. “Get up! Please, call your lawyer!”
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. “Stop hitting him!” 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.
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’t show us their badges, and as in Khalil’s case, they wouldn’t show us a warrant. Much like what happened to Abdalla, they threatened me with arrest, until they realized I was a Westerner. “There’s some woman with him; she has a U.S. passport,” one officer said into his cellphone, his ears drooping like a scolded dog after his boss told him not to arrest me.
Ultimately, we learned that my then-husband—who is a longtime atheist and was still tipsy after his shift at the time of his detention—had 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’s case. But we were lucky. After several weeks, his lawyer learned he’d 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 leftist “terrorist,” we learned that was because there was nothing—he was released after the government determined the Gülenists had planted the app on hundreds of random Turkish SIM cards.
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’t 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.
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 “Land of the Free” for exercising his rights—like thousands have been in Syria and Israel. Should the Trump Administration’s 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.
Maybe Khalil’s 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’s crackdown on noncitizen activists is unique in our history. Black Americans, migrants, Indigenous peoples, those living in poorer nations—they 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.
Regardless of that history, it seems clear political realities in the U.S. are shifting. The targeting of noncitizen activists—of a certain kind of political dissent—shows 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’t put into words, something that can never be repaired. Judging from Abdalla’s expression in those Reuters photos, I’d venture to say she may have felt something similar.
It’s been more than seven years, and I’m 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’s imprisonment. They were incredibly strong and resilient—I envied them that—but also in a way resigned to their reality. Many seemed confused by how upset I was, that I couldn’t 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. “Burası Türkiye,” they would tell me as an explanation for their attitudes—“This is Turkey.”
By forcing people to become numb in order to carry on with their lives in the midst of overwhelming pain and sadness, that’s 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’s not something we can ever afford to lose.