Guidance for international students on US’s hostile regime

This piece, “Guidance for international students on US’s hostile regime,” includes commentary from SAR Executive Director Rob Quinn on the United States government’s arrests and deportations of international students. Read select excerpts below:

…The increasingly hostile regime being created via President Donald Trump’s Executive Orders and their interpretation and implementation by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a federal agency, has triggered a plethora of new travel advice from governments and higher education institutions anxious to protect citizens more broadly, and students and academics specifically, from increasing incidents of detention, denial of entry, deportation and, according to one scholar rescue leader, Robert Quinn, being ‘disappeared’. […]

Referring to both the method by which students like Öztürk were arrested and where they are being held (though on 4 April, NBC News reported that she had been moved to a prison in Vermont), Robert Quinn, founding executive director of the Scholars at Risk (SAR) Network, used the word “disappeared”, which is

redolent of what occurred during the so-called “Dirty Wars” in Latin America during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, as well as in Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro and in the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos and, more recently, Rodrigo Duterte.

“Coming at it from the experience of history and the human rights community,” Quinn explained, “the term [disappeared] is used to describe the dynamics of state authority or state agents exercising power often in unmarked ways, often at night, often in ways intended to circumvent opportunities for normal legal process [as Rubio emphasised, there is no appeal of a revocation of a visa because ‘you have the power to deny; you have the power to revoke’].”

Further, Quinn said, the US federal government is “disappear[ing] individuals by “mak[ing] it hard to find human beings who have been taken into custody by spiriting people away and making it hard for family and legal counsel to find them.”

“Chilling is the most mild word I could use for that,” he said.

[…]

It’s a free country, isn’t it?

“None of this is new, and we have seen this in history, and we have seen this in our work around the world,” said Quinn, whose office at New York University is in Greenwich Village, one of the places in the United States where free speech and freedom seem almost embedded in the cobblestones of Washington Square Park.

“What’s new is it’s happening in the United States and the pace and the callousness with which it’s happening.

“For most of my life, I lived under the privilege of saying it’s a free country – a very flippant comment that people would say to each other, just to be dismissive.

“We are now forced to live in a place where the profound meaning of ‘It’s a free country’, that we took for granted, is on the surface, right?

“This isn’t a partisan issue. I don’t care who you support in the election. This is about state power being exercised outside of the norms of legal process,” he said.

Reported by Nathan M Greenfield for University World News. Read the full piece here »