The United States, Transforming Into a Police State? |
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
A few days ago, Turkish student Rümeysa Öztürk was walking down the street in Somerville, Massachusetts, looking for the restaurant where she had arranged to have dinner with some friends. A man blocked her path; she tried to continue walking when five more men, police officers in civilian clothes, took her phone and backpack and, after handcuffing her, put her in a car. They took her 1,500 miles away from home, to a detention center in Louisiana, for having published an article about Gaza in the university press. Without a trial. For 48 hours nobody heard anything about her: neither her attorney not her college. Furthermore, nobody knew that, without any notification, the Department of Home Security had arbitrarily canceled her student visa, thus making her illegal. (Regarding this procedure, Secretary of State Marco Rubio proclaimed to the press that his department had already revoked more than 300 legal statuses and that there would be more: “Every day we look for this kind of lunatics.”) Öztürk, who suffers from asthma, was unable to access her medication or call her lawyer, something that also happened to other foreigners detained in a similar way: Germans, Russians, Canadians.
Öztürk’s case makes me think of the people who were detained in the totalitarian communist regimes of the 20th century. A few years ago I interviewed a dozen women sentenced to years or decades in the gulag, during Stalinism and after it, who told me similar stories. The Spanish classical singer Lina Prokofiev, wife of the composer, was kidnapped in the late 1940s in the street by the Soviet secret police during her stay in Moscow. She was taken to prison and from there to the Siberian gulag where she spent seven years in the freezing cold cutting wood and peeling potatoes. Irina Emelianova, the daughter of Olga Ivinskaia, Boris Pasternak’s last........