Fascism Comes to the US, Visitors, Not So Much – Radio Free

Flying into the US at Newark International Airport last Monday after having been away from this country since last October 1 was a shock.

Over the 55 years my musician wife and I have been together, we’ve spent eight or portions of eight living abroad, and have also made many more short trips abroad for work, so we have had long experience with flying into a big US international airport and then dealing with the inevitable arrival hall lines and waiting to reach the passport control window where our passports and travel history are checked out and we are allowed to step back into the United States.

It has always been a hard part of the trip and never a pleasant one. Coming from Asia, where we spent considerable time, the flight used to take 14 hours, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, after which US civilian flights could use the shorter polar route crossing Siberia to reach China, Japan and Hong Kong. But even from the UK or Europe, the flight home to the US was and still is 7 or 8 hours. At that point the traveler is sleep deprived, jet-lagged from the time change, and stiff from being seated for so long, only to then face with a long line of similarly tired, sore and grumpy fliers all anxious to get to a comfy bed. Instead, though, they find themselves forced to shuffle slowly along through a snaking cattle chute for an hour or more before finally finally reaching a passport control counter.

But this last trip was different. Arriving from London Heathrow on time at 7:30 pm on a big British Airways Airbus at Newark International Airport, we deplaned and made our way to the cavernous immigration hall. But the scene we came upon was strange. Instead of a bustling throng of people making their way through long snaking lines and all complaining about the process or talking about where they’d been, the huge hall was nearly empty, with the few people there talking in hushed tones if it were a library or a funeralwae. There were no lines to be seen either at the section for US citizens and Green Card-holding permanent residents or the section for foreign passport holders — just a small clutch of bleary-eyed people at each of the several open and staffed passport inspection windows. At the section of passport control windows for US citizens and Green Card holders, an older man tasked with crowd control apparently, dressed in a bright red sweatshirt, who had nothing to do because of the paucity of passengers, barked commands: “Pick up that knapsack! No phone use in the hall!, keep moving!” All of it without a single “Please” or “Thank you,” a friendly “Welcome back!” or even a smile. Only the woman who checked our passports finally offered a brief, almost furtive smile and said, “Welcome home!” to us.

I found myself thinking, “Not for long, if we can help it!”

There is a reason that the Newark Airport immigration hall was so empty on an early Monday evening: People, even American citizens and Green Card-holding immigrants, are avoiding traveling back to America. are delaying, if they can, a return to their home country. Green Card holders are especially anxious about the “welcome” they might receive at the border, with ICE agents reportedly pulling aside legal residents who might have had a minor traffic stop on their record and paid a fine even years earlier . Some such people have reportedly ended up being sent to a detention center hundreds of miles away. This kind of thing especially happens if they were males and were found to sport tattoos, making them ‘suspected alien gang members and invaders” by default in President Trump’s new dystopian AmericKKKa.

Reports from tourism trade organizations show US tourism figures, which typically rise year after year and generate tens of billions of dollars in business income and taxes, dropped this year in March by 11.1 percent. A major explanation is that foreign governments are issuing travel warnings to their citizens and to visitors planning a return to ther us about the draconian risks of travel in the US. These range from aggressive militarized police to coercive and brutal immigration officers, to the ubiquity of guns and gun violence in American society. Horrific stories of lengthy detentions, hurried deportations with no hearing, and lack of access to a phone or computer to contact relatives or an attorney while confined. And many of the victims if such abuse are foreign tourists from supposedly friendly nations like Canada, Britain, Germany and France that are (or at least were), US allies. Not surprisingly, foreigners from nations that have long been major sources of US-bound tourists, including China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Germany and Spain are now opting for other destinations than Trump’s xenophobic America.

Germany’s Federal Foreign office, meanwhile, has added a warning about travel to the USA, advising that even having a valid authorization permit or U.S. visa doesn’t guarantee the right to enter the country and, if refused, “there is no legal recourse against this decision.” The warning goes on to say ,“Criminal records in the United States, false information about the purpose of their stay, or even a slight overstay of their visa upon entry or exit can lead to arrest, detention, and deportation”

Meanwhile, Germany, Denmark and Finland, which all allow their citizens who are transgender or binary to list their gender as X on their passports, are being warned that the US may deny entry to transgender or non-binary travelers. They are also advising travelers to the US to wipe personal data from all devices being brought into the US, to avoid logging into personal email or social media accounts while in the US, and to use encrypted cloud storage instead of local files, and to minimize device use at customs.

In another rather shocking development, responding to increasing incidents of ICE and Border Patrol officers searching the contents of and even confiscating computers and phones of people entering the US, a growing number of countries, including Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, and Ireland, are advising their citizens to leave their phones at home and to switch to using so-called “burner phones” picked up in the US (which unlike in most other countries, can be purchased with cash and qwith no need to register with a passport or ID card, making them untraceable. This, they are saying, is necessary because border agents are checking the mail and social media records of visitor and immigrant phones looking for content— critical comments about the US or President Trump, evidence of support for abortion, LGBTQ rights, criticism of US foreign policy, etc. —which could lead to refusal to admit someone to the US, or could even lead to detention and deportation in some cases. Among the recommendations being made to travelers from those countries to the US:

The European Union has even begun issuing burner phones — so called because they can be destroyed when the traveler is done with them — to staff-members and diplomatic officials traveling to the US. It’s an astonishing development given that burner phones had in the past been a favorite of criminals seeking to hide their activities, connections, and call history.

In the the UK, we are hearing from friends from the US who are on visiting fellowships at Cambridge that they are looking for ways to extend their stays in hopes of being away from the US, ideally until Trump is history. Meanwhile, a black friend in the US has told us he is taking precautions against the development of a full-on fascist dictatorship and martial law e Washington, and has prepared a “grab bag” of needed materials to facilitate a quick departure without having to first obtain a visa. This friend cites the deadly error made by many German and Austrian Jews and leftists who didn’t flee those countries during Hitler’s rise to power when they still could. “As a black person I want to be able to leave quickly and safely when it seems like things could be getting dangerous,” he/she explains.

It is not a crazy idea for non-whites and for any American who works in a field that involves criticism of US political leaders (like journalists). The US has been cracking up since Election Day last Nov. 5. We had left for the UK on last October 1, a day after casting our absentee ballots at the Montgomery County Courthouse’s Voter Registrar’s Office drop box, with plans to spend the academic year as a visiting professor and of harpsichord and a freelance journalist at Cambridge University. We had assumed at that time that the following summer we’d be returning to a country with a female African-American/Indian president and a House and possibly also a Senate with Democratic majorities. Each day, since that election, however, we have been increasingly thankful for the 3000 miles of cold and stormy Atlantic Ocean separating us from the madness in Washington. In Britain, I read in British papers about horrors I could never have imagined happening in my country: Foreign students (including Palestinians) from one of my alma maters, Columbia University (where I studied Chinese language and then earned a Masters in Journalism and a post-graduate certificate in Business and Financial journalism), being expelled for peacefully protesting e genocide and US support for that crime, and then losing their student visas and finding that the University administration had reported them to the US Department of Homeland Security.

One of those students, Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian born to two exiled Palestinian parents in a Syrian refugee camp, just graduated with a masters degree in international affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs who served as a leader and key negotiator for the student protesters in their encampment protest on the University’s main quad. Khalil was maliciously and falsely accused by the administration of being pro-Hamas and anti-Israel, which the school’s then president Manatee Shafik and many members of the University’s Board of Trustees sophistically equated with his thus being “anti-semitic.’ Khalil, a Green Card holder with permanent residency in the US, was arrested by a hooded gang of Homeland Security thugs alerted by university officials to his home address in a campus apartment building. They hauled him off to detention in Louisiana, a thousand miles from his pregnant American-citizen wife. There he faces deportation, though a federal judge in Washington has stayed any action against him by the government.

Khalil is only one of hundreds of students in those detention camps, none of them charged with a crime , only of protesting and with the bogus accusation of “anti-semitic,” which of course, even if true, would be protected free speech under the First Amendment.

My old school Columbia, a place where professors like Fred Friendly, the storied producer of Edward R. Murrow’a famously courageous CBS news program “See It Now,” which took on Sen. Joe McCarthy the 1950s, would never have stood by silently if Columbia had behaved as supinely as it did when President Trump and Congressional Republicans (and some Democrats) demanded that protesters against Israel be suspended or expelled for their protest against the genocide in Gaza and America’s support for it.

I’ve made it clear to both the Graduate School of Journalism and Columbia University itself, both institutions which I once proudly claimed as my alma mater, that have now become a source of embarrassment to me.ccc I instructed them to remove my name, address, email and phone number from their Alumni Office donor solicitations files. “I have much better places to donate my money,” I wrote them: “ There will include legal assistance funding for students who have had their student visas cancelled by the school and those who are consequently now facing deportation, and my other alma mater, Wesleyan University whose president, historian Michael Roth, I’m proud to say, has been uniquely outspoken in condemning both the Trump administration for its attack on academic freedom, and the administrators and boards of trustees of universities who have gutlessly bent the knee to Trump’s tyrannical actions and use of financial extortion against freedom of thought, speech and the right to protest on campus.

Columbia has been shamed, I’m happy to say, by Harvard University’s firm and publicly announced refusal last week to surrender to Trump’s extortionate. demands to block $2.1 billion in government funds to the school and to seek to have the IRS cancel Harvard’s not-for-profit status. Instead Harvard is suing to block him and to meanwhile replace blocked federal grant funding with funds from the University’s endowment (as Wesleyan’s Roth has called for doing). Following that, Columbia, is now saying it is “rethinking” its earlier cave-in to Trump,

Columbia’s initial supine collapse collapsed in fhe face of Trump’s appalling power grab included agreeing to turn over the administration of three of its departments — those focusing on Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia—to the Trump administration’s Department of Education! But ‘reconsidering’ that sellout of principle is hardly enough! Columbia, by its initial cowardice, has already set in motion a string of surrenders by less well endowed schools across the country, and in any event its new president (the third in less than two months!) has not retracted the university’s shameful equation of anti-Israel with anti-semitic, or issued a full-throated defense of freedom of speech for students and faculty and freedom to protest peacefully on campus. Where is there a promise from Columbia to use its resources and its brilliant law school faculty to bring Khalil and other suspended student protesters back from detention and to restore them in good standing as students, making make Khalil and the other victims of Columbia’s cowardice whole and free again.

Even then at this late stage, I will not be putting my signature on a check to Columbia. The school has a lot to make up for, starting with apologizing for former President Shafik’s grotesque and uncalled-for decision to invite the NYPD onto the campus to roust peaceful student protesters from their tents and to have them arrested. As I told Columbia University ’s administrators, Trustees and alumni office, and the Journalism School’s Dean and alumni office in emails, There are much better places for me to put my money: Wesleyan University and defense funds for students facing deportation because of Columbia’s perfidy.