‘To Terrorize Americans Into Quiescence’: Reagan Judge Excoriates Trump
At least one judge gets it.
US District Judge William Young for the Massachusetts district, named Ronald Reagan, accused Trump administration on Tuesday in a long opinion of a radical campaign aimed at reducing political freedoms in the United States. It extends from attacks against law firms to ice agents who go unidentifiable by the port of mask, on the ostensible subject of Young’s opinion: targeting non-citizens for expulsion according to their pro-Palestine activism. All this, wrote Young, depends on the conviction that Americans are too divided to defend attacks on freedoms that apply to everyone.
Young ruled in the 161-page opinion that the Trump administration had violated the first amendment by selectively expelling non-citizens on their pro-Palestine activism. The judge ranked on the side of several university associations which brought the prosecution claiming that the moves were part of a coordinated campaign to remove the dissent, violating the rights of freedom of expression that extend to non-citizens.
The opinion provides a detailed description of the functioning of the immigration system and the way in which the Trump administration, during its first months in power, transformed it into an ideological suppression instrument. It is a convincing reading, and which places very publicized detentions like those of Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk in the administration’s attempt to unilaterally modify a systematic modification of the way in which immigration laws are applied. A start of decree, Young wrote: “Blend[ed] legally protected speech and unprotected discourse ”around anti -Semitism.
This then led the officials who had devoted their career to the work of the non -partisan government to find themselves taken in a paradox, wrote Young. To continue doing their job, they had to follow the dictates of the names of Trump interested in staging a campaign against dissent. By forming it, it meant that they had been “armed by their highest superiors to draw conclusions before the most vile ends”.
The number of non-citizens targeted for pro-Palestine activism or the criticism of Israel is relatively low in the midst of wider mass deportation efforts of the administration and repression on disadvantaged views. But the attack is of a play for the Trump administration: many actions which lead to the most fierce criticism of the defenders of civil liberties are either on a large scale or legally questionable. A recent executive decree not linked to immigration declaring antifa a “terrorist organization” was encountered in part because, even if “anti -fas” existed as a formal entity, there is no means in American law to declare a national group a terrorist organization.
For young people, these debates around the scale or legal viability are lacking the point.
The intention, he wrote, is to use the cases of “a few” which “express themselves” to give an example for the rest, “terrorizing the not located (and others) pro-Palestinians in silence because their opinions were not connected”.
Sometimes, opinion turns into the somewhat flowery opinions of Young on what he presented as an old -fashioned American values. Ice officers took the shield of their identity by carrying masks, wrote the judge. “Can you imagine a masked sailor?” It is a question of honor – and honor still counts. ”
But even that, he wrote, is not targeted on the non-citizens: “The ice will masked for a single reason-to terrorize the Americans in quiescence.”
Everything underlines what opinion throws as the fundamental bet of the Trump administration: the rights that the White House has attacked in the last eight months apply independently of political opinions; Reduir also affects everyone, including non-citizens residing in the United States
The Trump administration did not throw its exercise of power this way. Rather, he has portrayed these efforts either as a means of attacking internal political opponents, often considered to be reprisals against the left, or as necessary for national security. For young people, it is a fundamental act of deception: rocking those who are not the immediate targets of these actions “thinking that their own personal interests are not affected”.
