This is a short post, a break from my French New Wave series to offer some updates on the situation in DC and on college campuses, as I’ve experienced.

We are very on edge here. The threat of ICE showing up on campus and grabbing international students has become very real over the last two weeks. Beyond what we’ve seen at Columbia, Tufts, and close to home, Georgetown, we’ve received emails from the university about how to hand an ICE Raid.

I hope this is quite shocking to anyone reading this if you have not been paying close attention. It is now an expected reality at universities in the U.S. that students (and faculty?) who are in the United States on legal work visas (and in one instance, a green card) could have their documentation unilaterally rescinded because they participated in a protest or wrote an op-ed. They are not warned of such action, and instead simply scooped up by ICE agents (without warrants, since no judge has signed off on this) and disappeared into a detention network. And the response of our “liberal” institutions has been to say, we can’t stop it, we will comply with ICE, we can’t protect our students and their rights.

This is an enormous emergency, and it is clearly meant to terrorize students (both citizens and non-citizens) with spectacular and frightening displays of the ICE raid on campus, where they should feel safe to speak and learn. And I want to emphasize that being disappeared for 24-48 hours only to surface in a detention facility 1000 of miles away is a dire human rights infringement, knowing what we know about the disrespect of ICE and those facilities for human rights, on top of the civil rights infringement on free speech that is happening. And I can report that students are in fact quite nervous, as are their teachers. It is truly frightening.

In the face of this threat and the university's lack of support for the community, I have had to make a decision that I believe demonstrates the obvious chilling effect of such actions on academic freedom and free speech. As I’ve mentioned here, I am teaching my Humanities I course about stories of migration, using The Odyssey as a launching point to deal with the literature of migration in the modern world. I had planned on ending the semester with Susan Abulhawa’s “Against the Loveless World.” Abulhawa is a Palestinian diaspora writer and the novel is the story of a Palestinian born a generation after the Nakba in a Kuwait Palestinian refugee camp. It is about the experience of the generations of Palestinians who, having been displaced by the Nakba, remain stateless migrants, their thwarted attempts to return to what remains of occupied Palestine, and the way they remained dogged by Israeli defense wherever they go.

I decided I could not teach this novel this week when I realized it meant asking students in my class to carry around a book with them that says “Palestine Book Awards Winner” on the cover. I could not shake the fear that an international student in my class could get accosted by ICE on campus and having been discovered to have a “Palestine” book in their bag, face unpredictable consequences. Whatever risks I take as a professor or scholar talking about Palestine or wearing a keffiyeh to campus, I did not feel it was right to ask students to carry that risk.

Now, I may be overreacting. The international students being targeted are being targeted for their involvement in pro-Palestinian anti-Gaza genocide protests last year. It seems possible that ICE and the State Department are working from lists created by pro-Zionist groups—that what we are seeing is U.S. collaboration with Israeli terror of Palestinians and other Middle Easterners the world over in the name of “security.” Therefore, it is perhaps not likely that ICE will be doing random stops and searches of just any international student. And if they were, would they pay any attention to a random novel they glance at?

But I don’t know where this is going in the next four weeks, or what level of terror ICE has been instructed to inflict on college campuses to make students, faculty, and administrators afraid of criticizing Israel. That is the intent here, and it is not hard to imagine, since Universities have refused to stand up to Trump, unpredictable escalations of the already dire emergency we are facing. Like all state terror around speech, it has wide-ranging chilling effects. And this decision of mine to not teach this book right now is one of them. I feel sick to my stomach cowering in this way, but I have no support from my university, and I cannot shake the thought I could be putting students at risk.

Outside the university, my local community is also facing terror from ICE. I live in Columbia Heights, an area of Washington DC with a large Latino population, including many migrants from the Central American northern triangle who have been targeted by Trump’s mass deportation threats. The community is on edge, posters and fliers are everywhere about people’s rights if approached by ICE and how to witness and record if you are a bystander.

A particularly dire situation is the threats to DC elementary schools. We keep hearing rumors of ICE showing up at schools without warrants (they never have fucking warrants) to try to intimidate schools into letting them grab an employee during the day when school is in session. And now we are getting rumors about ICE showing up at dismissal to grab parents and children as they leave the building, in front of other kids. I am trying to get myself some bystander training so I can be ready to show up on short notice and at least witness and film the kidnapping of children by the state. I have nothing to add but my sheer horror that this is what we are facing in this country today. It’s so much worse than I think has dawned on the broader public, and if there’s one thing I know, an agency like ICE cannot be permitted to exist in a society that wants to claim to have basic civil and human rights. I’m not going to make this case here or now, this is about the sense of siege many of us are feeling but I remain certain whoever challenges Trump must have the following as a centerpiece of their platform if they want my vote.

ABOLISH ICE