An important new public opinion survey taken by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has revealed very little American support for the deportation of legal foreign guests in the United States for expressing support for Palestine in its current conflict with Israel.
Responding to FIRE’s quarterly National Speech Index survey conducted by the Dartmouth Polarization Research Lab this month, a mere one-quarter of the respondents supported the deportation of non-citizens legally in the US for expressing pro-Palestine views. A solid majority of 52 percent are strongly opposed or opposed to such measures.
The survey result comes as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has boasted of revoking “at least 300” student visas for the “crime” of expressing a position on middle east politics that the current US Administration disagrees with. Derided by Rubio as “lunatics” for opposing ongoing US government support for Israel as Gaza is flattened, many foreign students have been arrested by masked, armed federal agents – who refuse to even identify themselves – and sent to a federal detention facility in Louisiana.
In the case of Turkish PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk, the State Department had already produced a report concluding that she neither supported terrorism nor anti-Semitism before masked federal agents accosted her on the street and arrested her.
Her “crime” was co-authoring an op-ed in her university newspaper a year earlier criticizing Israel.
In many cases these arrests are carried out based on lists provided to the federal government by a militant, extremist group called Betar. The group is so radical that it has even been added to the pro-Israel ADL’s “extremism” list, yet somehow it has the ear of the Trump Administration.
Commenting on the findings, FIRE Chief Research Advisor Sean Stevens said, “deporting someone simply for disagreeing with the government’s foreign policy preferences strikes at the very freedoms the First Amendment was designed to protect. Americans are right to reject this kind of viewpoint-based punishment.”
Additionally, the shocking arrests and incarceration of legal residents or guests for committing no crime beyond expressing a particular point of view has begun to eat away at Americans’ confidence that the Trump Administration can be trusted to uphold the First Amendment. From Inauguration day until the FIRE poll this month, a majority of Americans have now lost confidence in the Trump Administration’s respect for our most sacred right of free expression:
Many Americans mistakenly believe government “grants” rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights, and that it grants them to American citizens only. Constitutional scholar Andrew Napolitano dismisses such claims, writing:
We know from the writings of James Madison — who authored the Bill of Rights — that the Founders regarded the freedom of speech as a personal individual natural right. It is also, of course, expressly protected from government interference and reprisal in the First Amendment. The courts have ruled that it protects all persons — no matter their immigration status — who may think as they wish, say what they think, publish what they say, worship or not and associate with whomever they choose.
While many supporters of the Trump Administration are currently applauding the arrest and deportation of legal foreign residents who express political views they do not support, they would do well to keep in mind that the vicissitudes of the American body politic may well soon turn against them and their views, and – particularly given President Trump’s stated intent to begin deporting American citizens as well – once the trap of a precedent is set they may not be able to wiggle out of it.
Indespensible pro-liberty intellectual Jim Bovard best expressed it best in a recent article:
What legal perils will pro-freedom protestors face in the coming years if the Ozturk rule is canonized, entitling federal officials to crush any disfavored opinion? Big-spending Democrats may consecrate Modern Monetary Theory and demonize anyone who criticizes the Federal Reserve. I took this ‘Kill the Central Bank’ photo of Ron Paul supporters at a 2008 Capitol Hill event for his presidential campaign. If the same protestors had peacefully carried the same banner within a half mile of the Capitol on January 6, they likely would have been nailed on a bevy of federal charges. Many politicians have made stark their hatred of libertarians and freedom advocates.
As long as anyone is sitting in shackles in a federal detention center simply for writing an op-ed, freedom of speech is not safe for anyone in the United States.
While a trip into the bowels of social media suggests a torch-bearing mob rallying to send those guilty of the “wrongthink” of the day to some El Salvadorian gulag, the good work of the freedom of expression organization FIRE reassures us that cooler heads continue to prevail. However, that by no means we can afford to let our guard down for a minute. This is not an issue of partisanship, but of principle. The mob – whether left or right – must not be allowed to take over.
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