On the evening of March 8, Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student at Columbia University, was arrested in his New York apartment by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. Despite his status as a legal permanent resident in the United States, with all the constitutional rights of a citizen, Khalil has been held without charge in a Louisiana prison for over a month, under the assumption his presence will have negative consequences for U.S. foreign policy. However, behind the legal language is the truth that his confinement resulted from vocal dissent against Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip. Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University, was kidnapped, and is currently being unlawfully detained by ICE for nothing more than an op-ed she co-wrote in 2024 decrying her school’s refusal to divest from companies fueling Israel’s crimes. These are just two of the numerous examples of students across the country being abducted by federal agents for exercising their free speech rights.
In the current political landscape, one concept reigns supreme: uncertainty. No political truism can be taken for granted, and faith in our government’s stability has quickly turned into an understanding that decades-old norms, rules, and even institutions can be dissolved with the stroke of a pen. In the wake of this uncertainty, Americans need a new way of interacting with the political world based on skeptical resistance.
We are witnessing the decay of institutional security. U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff-based seesawing has pushed Wall Street into a sharp dive toward bull market territory, with only brief respites of hope interrupting a general trend of economic pessimism. The President’s constant banter about running for a third term has inspired Representative Andy Ogles to propose a Constitutional amendment allowing such a nightmare to come alive. Returning to the issue of political deportations: the broad repression of political speech, as I think we are all aware, does not often confine itself to a single group of people, whether they be progressives, noncitizens, or criminals. Especially given Trump’s contempt for the media, there is no guarantee he will respect the free speech rights of other Americans when they prove inconvenient, nor does it seem likely that he will respect the orders of federal courts compelling him to do so.
This is not a call for widespread paranoia. We should not immediately throw our hands to the air and assume the worst has already happened. But we should be extremely vigilant and refuse to count out even the most outlandish possibilities: if anyone is a master at unleashing the unthinkable, it is the sitting president.
Five years ago, I would have thought that a mob of fascists storming the Capitol was unimaginable. After Jan. 6, I would never have predicted that the man who initiated such a riot would be re-elected and go on to pardon those who committed treason in his name. I never expected the Supreme Court to grant him full immunity from criminal prosecution for his attempt to overthrow the government. We are constantly on the precipice of disaster, yet we never see it until we fall off the ledge.
We need to internalize the fact that the protections we once had no longer exist or, if they do exist, have been significantly weakened. Free speech, in the case of student protestors, is under attack. Due process was waived entirely in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was wrongfully deported to an El Salvador prison and is being denied reprieve by the federal government, in spite of a Supreme Court decision ordering the Trump administration to facilitate his return. Civil rights laws and programs established in the ’60s, such as former President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Executive Order 11246, are being repealed or eroded away. That should be a radicalizing realization, and the action that spawns from it must be equipped to meet the moment.
This is nothing new: the U.S. has never fully lived up to its promise of liberty and justice for all. The Red Scare and Lavender Scare of the 20th century, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the suspension of due process and other constitutional provisions during the War on Terror — all of these predate Trump’s tyranny. But the fact that this is nothing new, that it has occurred recently and under much less dangerous administrations, should tell us that the outlandish is by no means unrealistic.
The only way for us to fight instability from the outside is to fully embrace it. If we operate from an understanding that the worst can happen, we will be more prepared when it does. I understand the value of levelheadedness and rationality — I am not proposing that we overthrow those ideas in favor of complete panic. Still, offloading our own resilience and resistance to Trump’s repression onto a legal system that has not yet found a way to effectively enforce its decisions does not seem especially secure to me. Instead, we should actively resist. The “Hands Off!” movement is a great start, but it needs to expand and remain constant. Protests should happen weekly, or monthly, and we need to make clear to our representatives that we will not stand for systematized madness. Boycott companies that bend the knee to Trump, advocate for the most vulnerable groups in society, and remind others that this is not a normal time.
The basis for all of this is refusing to be comfortable. Uncertainty and discomfort have overtaken every aspect of American life; pretending like they haven’t is nothing more than willful ignorance.
