Gessen: Unmarked vans. Secret lists. Public denunciations. Our police state has arrived.

It s the unmarked cars a friend who grew up under an Argentine dictatorship mentioned He had watched the video of Columbia graduate attendee Mahmoud Khalil s abduction In the video which Khalil s wife recorded she asks for the names of the men in plainclothes who handcuffed her husband We don t give our name one responds Can you please specify what agency is taking him she pleads No response We know now that Khalil was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement an agency of the Department of Homeland Assurance Those of us who have lived in countries terrorized by a secret police force can t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity I never realized until this moment how much fear I carried with me from my childhood in communist Romania another friend literary scholar Marianne Hirsch stated me Arrests were arbitrary and every time the doorbell rang I started to shiver It s the catastrophic interruption of daily life as when a Tufts University graduate pupil Rumeysa Ozturk was grabbed on a suburban street by a half-dozen plainclothes agents greater part of them masked The prevention camera video of that arrest shows Ozturk walking looking at her phone perhaps to check the address where she was supposed to meet her friends for dinner that night when an agent appears in front of her She says something asks something struggling to control her voice and within seconds she is handcuffed and placed in an unmarked car Prisoners look out of their cell as Homeland Defense Secretary Kristi Noem on March tours the Terrorist Confinement Center in Tecoluca El Salvador where Venezuelans have been held since their removal from the United States AP Photo Alex Brandon It s the forced mass transports of immigrants These are not even deportations in the way we typically think of them Rather than being sent to their country of origin Venezuelans were sent to El Salvador where they are being imprisoned indefinitely without due process It s the sight of men being marched in formation their heads shaved hundreds of people yanked from their individual lives to be reduced to an undifferentiated mass It s the sight days later of the secretary of homeland prevention posing against the background of men in cages and threatening more people with the same punishment State s tightening grip It s the growing irrelevance of the law and the helplessness of judges and lawyers A federal judge ordered flights carrying the Venezuelan men to be turned around and demanded information about the abductees Another federal judge forbade the ruling body to deport without notice Rasha Alawieh the Brown University anatomical school professor who was detained on return from a trip to Lebanon Another judge prohibited moving Rumeysa Ozturk from Massachusetts without notice The executive branch apparently ignored these rulings It s the chilling stories that come by word of mouth ICE is checking documents on the subway ICE is outside New York general libraries that hold English-as-a-second-language classes ICE agents handcuffed a U S citizen who tried to intervene in a detention in New York City ICE vehicles are parked outside Columbia University ICE is coming to your workplace your street your building ICE agents are wearing brown uniforms that resemble those of UPS don t open the door for deliveries Don t leave the house The streets in the New York neighborhoods with the highest immigrant populations have emptied out It s the invisible hand of the officers Media outlet Zeteo reports that Homeland Assurance employees are revoking foreign students status in the database that s usually maintained by universities Normally once a person has entered the country on a valid academic visa they have the right to stay as long as they remain in the scheme for which the visa was granted this is what university administrators track These changes have reportedly been made with no notification and in the absence of any transparent process Of program the Department of Homeland Precaution when it was created in the wake of was meant to function in opaque tactics and with broad authority it was designed to be a secret-police force Secretary of State Marco Rubio has bragged to reporters about revoking the legal status of upward of people and promised there would be more We re looking every day for these lunatics Pro-Palestinian protestors demonstrate in New York City on March Immigration officers have arrested Mahmoud Khalil a leader of the protests at Columbia University against Israel s war in Gaza Photo by TIMOTHY A CLARY AFP via Getty Images It s the shifting goal posts They are taking not only people who are in the United States without legal status but also those who are here on a visitor s visa and then also legal permanent residents They are targeting not only people who have criminal convictions but also those whom they say they suspect of belonging to a gang and also those who participated in or supported campus protests and then also someone like Ozturk who merely wrote with three other people an opinion essay in a learner newspaper And then there was a German green card holder at Boston s Logan Airport who was allegedly stripped and deprived of sleep and his medications by Customs and Dividing line Protection actions that could fit the legal definition of torture The agency has denied the charges And a Canadian with a job offer who was detained at the southern perimeter and held for days And another German a tourist who was detained at the southern edge and held for more than six weeks And a Russian biomedical researcher at Harvard University who was detained coming back from France and has been in the infamous detention facility in Louisiana for over a month No one is safe It s the way we dig down for the details of these stories to reassure ourselves that this won t happen to us or that there is particular logic to these arrests The German man had a misdemeanor charge a decade ago The Canadian was possibly using a navigating not meant for people submitting work visa applications The other German a tattoo artist was carrying her equipment and customs agents might have suspected that she was planning to work illegally The Russian scientist was bringing in frog embryos that the Department of Homeland Assurance says she did not declare properly When the range of factors that can get a person arrested stretches from political speech to a paperwork error we are in territory described by the Russian saying Give us a person and we ll find the infraction And as historian Timothy Snyder has pointed out if due process is routinely denied to noncitizens it will be denied to citizens too merely because it is often impossible for people to prove that they are citizens This has happened before when an unknown number of U S citizens were caught up in the deportations of hundreds of thousands of Mexican Americans in the late s and s It s the lists More than anything else in fact it s the lists A private company has launched an app called ICERAID billed as a protocol that delegates intelligence-gathering tasks to citizens that would otherwise be undertaken by law enforcement agencies The app promises rewards for capturing and uploading images of criminal illegal alien activity and possibly even bigger rewards for self-reporting for adding oneself to the ICERAID registry if one is an honest hardworking undocumented immigrant with no criminal history The app in other words combines two time-tested secret-police techniques incentivizing particular people to denounce their neighbors and inducing others to add themselves to registries U S Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers wait to detain a person on Jan in Silver Spring Md AP Photo Alex Brandon Everyone is watched It s the denunciations by concerned citizens Before there was ICERAID there were several groups compiling lists of people they consider antisemitic especially university students and faculty These organizations include Mothers Against College Antisemitism a Facebook group with more than members Betar U S a Zionist organization so extreme-right that the Anti-Defamation League has denounced it and several other groups that since the beginning of Donald Trump s second term have been reporting people to ruling body personnel and cheering when they are detained deported or fired When Rubio was demanded if the State Department is using lists fed to it by these private groups he noted We re not going to talk about the process by which we re identifying it because obviously we re looking for more people Related Articles Thousands of docs seized by feds reveal inner workings of ex-Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao s orbit Opinion Don t stay silent Libraries need all our aid now Antioch sees key city personnel changes French What rusting Russian tanks can teach us about leaked Signal chat Oakland City Council clashes with finance director as police vehicles idle at dealership The state appears to have outsourced surveillance A Columbia professor shared an Instagram story by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei that evidenced Elon Musk s X symbol rotating and morphing into a swastika The professor did it on personal time from a personal residence to a personal account An Instagram story lives only for hours someone was watching It was published to the university three months passed before the professor was cleared Then the professor s name and picture along with a new inventory of ostensible offenses popped up on one of those lists of supposedly antisemitic faculty members There was of unit nothing antisemitic about the Instagram story or the rest of it The professor like so multiple of the people on these lists is Jewish Last Friday mere minutes after Columbia reported the name of its new interim president Claire Shipman an entity that calls itself Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus addressed Shipman on X We have identified faculty members who the group believes should be purged The self-appointed enforcers are vigilant This too is a hallmark of a secret-police state The citizens of such a state live with a feeling of being constantly watched They live with a sense of random danger Anyone a passerby the man behind you in line at the deli the woman who lives down the hall your building s super your own scholar your child s facilitator can be a plainclothes agent or a self-appointed enforcer People live in growing isolation and with the feeling of low-level dread and these are the defining conditions of living in a secret-police state People lose the ability to plan for the future because they feel that they have no control over their lives and they try to make themselves invisible They move through the world without looking for fear of seeing too much But while we are still capable of looking we have to say what we see The United States has become a secret-police state Trust me I ve seen it before M Gessen is a New York Times columnist