Stateless

There are news stories that haunt you. Maybe it’s just journalists, but I don’t think so.

For me, it was the story of Hoda Muthana, the daughter of a Yemeni diplomat. Muthana was born in the U.S. and grew up in Alabama. Prevented from living like a normal American teenager by her ultra-conservative family, she turned to the internet for a social life, connecting to the “Muslim Twittersphere,” where she bought into a radical form of Islam and ran off to join ISIS. After giving birth to a child, she fled and expressed remorse. She wanted to come back to the U.S. even if it meant prison time, and she was eager to talk about the dangers of the kind of brainwashing she had experienced.

The Obama administration revoked Muthana’s U.S. passport in 2016. In 2019, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that Muthana would not be permitted to return to the U.S. As of last year, Muthana and her son, Adam, remained in a Syrian refugee camp. The naive young woman - a college sophomore - made a decision that would result in her becoming a stateless person. A person without rights.

On the surface, I had nothing in common with Hoda Muthana. But when I first read about the case, I was in the midst of a bruising five-year effort to bring my twin stepsons to the U.S. I was learning that the rights we took for granted as American citizens were not as fixed and immutable as I had always assumed.

I hasten to add that there was no political element to our situation, other than the rancid politics of Trump’s immigration czar Stephen Miller. My then-husband is a former professional soccer player who grew up in Kenya. He came to the U.S. as a green card holder in 2009. Ten years later, he naturalized as a U.S. citizen. His sole political activity had taken place in his twenties when he organized his Kenyan soccer team to strike for higher wages. (The other team members got raises. He was fired. Lesson learned.)

But he hails from the East African coast, where Arab slavers plied their trade hundreds of years ago, marrying local women and making converts. He is, at least nominally, Muslim, although his brand of Islam can be gauged by his decision to marry an atheist Jewish journalist horrified by his culture’s treatment of women and by religion generally. His twin sons call themselves feminists and, as far as I’m concerned, these boys walk the walk. But for years, as we fought to bring the boys to the U.S., I couldn’t shake the feeling that if you make a misstep - marry the wrong guy, for example, maybe a cute African soccer player instead of the appropriate investment banker - everything in your life can change.

I won’t get into the legal details of Kafkaesque nightmare that was our “immigration journey.” The boys’ Kenyan mom, their dad, and I had agreed that the boys should come to the U.S. when it was time for middle school. Unfortunately this coincided with Trump’s election in 2016.

Our paperwork was in order and we had received preliminary approval. Suddenly, agencies tasked with administering legal immigration seemed to be not only in chaos but in virtual shutdown, slow rolling applications, including family reunification. Even a tiny error on an application could result in a denial.

I had two graduate degrees and I had worked as a journalist for my entire adult life. But I realized that simply being able to fill out paperwork accurately was not enough. Lawyers had become essential, and not just any lawyer. You needed someone really good. Someone expensive.

The five years we spent trying to get the boys into the U.S. cost tens of thousands of dollars. The expense of that struggle destroyed my immigrant husband’s ability to get established in the middle class. He worked, sometimes two jobs. I dealt with the lawyers: strategizing, assembling documents, doing research.

This went on, as I said for five years, from 2017 until 2022. For all that time, I didn’t feel that I had a right to complain. I was acutely aware that the Trump administration was separating children from their families and that many of those families were suffering in detention centers run by private companies like GeoGroup, Inc., CoreCivic, and the Management & Training Corporation, all of which have experienced soaring stock prices since Trump was re-elected. I read the horror stories. Sometimes I wrote them. I often thought about the cognitive dissonance. Materially I was living in relative comfort but I felt imprisoned. At times, rage would take over. Or grief.

Most of all, I remember the false hope. Once, when the lawyer sounded optimistic, I bought SunMaid raisins, the same little boxes mother used to get for my brother and me, so the boys could have healthy snacks to bring to school.

My husband and I ate a few. I threw the rest out. I couldn’t stand to look at them.

A couple of years later, things were looking good again. It was late summer, maybe early fall. I bought fleece jackets from REI. The boys weren’t used to cold weather. I didn’t want them to be cold.

I kept those jackets, stubbornly, for nearly a year. Finally, when the boys had outgrown them - I checked - I sent them back, grateful for REI’s liberal return policy.

“Did they come to visit?” friends would ask. “Do they like America?”

I had to explain that in the U.S. immigration system, once you apply for a visa to immigrate it is virtually impossible to get a tourist visa. The pretext is that the authorities believe it’s likely the applicant will overstay their visa. The assumption, always, is guilt.

I often felt as though I had unwittingly walked into an interrogation room, where I had no rights and authorities kept turning back my professions of innocence. My degrees from elite schools meant nothing. Neither did the career that had earned me respect. I even had a mutual friend with an official at the U.S. consulate in Nairobi. He blew off my attempt to back channel.

I had women friends, professional women like me who adored their stepchildren, happy for a chance at motherhood. They had the kids on weekends. They went to graduations, school plays. I felt exiled from normal life.

So I read Moby Dick and The Odyssey on WhatsApp with the boys during their gap year. The rest of the time, I shut down my feelings, losing myself in work.

Not long after Joe Biden got elected, the boys got their visas. Their Kenyan mom and I went to their interview at the U.S. consulate. The stack of paperwork in front of the consular official was, literally, a foot high, maybe higher.

Trying to establish whether they indeed had a relationship with my husband, the consular official asked the boys: “What’s your father like?”

“He’s a cool guy,” one said. The other nodded sagely.

And that was that. The absurdity of the past five years contrasted with the utter normalcy of “He’s a cool guy.” He is, in fact, a cool guy.

Three years later, one kid is premed at the college I attended in Connecticut, hoping to become a neurosurgeon, and the other is studying computer science. Both have insanely high averages, around 3.9. They are textbook examples of immigrant success, at least so far.

But they haven’t forgotten those five years and neither have I. The day after Trump was re-elected, both boys called me from their respective colleges. One wanted to make sure I’d filled out a proof of citizenship application. The other simply said: “When are we leaving?”

I reassured them, never anticipating that Trump and the Project 2025 extremists would move so quickly.

The Soccer War is a great book by the great Ryszard Kapuściński, the Polish press correspondent in Africa and Latin America in the 1960s. Kapuściński excelled at writing about daily life in the midst of wars and coups. He had surreal roadside misadventures. He knew leaders, good and bad. He also knew the price exacted by charisma, by demagoguery. He wrote: “You have to see the crowd on the way to a rally, festive, excited, with fever in their eyes.” Because they can do anything then, the crowd, when they have that fever.

I’m writing this now to tell you about my experience with immigration as a middle-class white American. What that story signals: You are not immune. You are not immune because you’re white, or because you have a green card like Columbia University graduate student and pro-Palestine protester Mahmoud Khalil, now residing in a Louisiana detention center because his protests allegedly posed a threat to the “foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.”

According to the New Yorker, Khalil is being held under a seldom-used provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act, stating that ‘an alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.’ That clause, which dates to 1952, originally targeted Jewish immigrants suspected of being Soviet spies, the magazine notes.

Fact check: Khalil has not been accused of providing any material support to Hamas. For any objective observer, even one who looks askance at the pro-Palestine student protests, the issues are not foreign policy consequences but free speech and the rule of law. Khalil is, as stated, a legal permanent resident, married to an American, and about to become a father.

Soon, I am pretty sure, if you’re a citizen that won’t matter, either, if you piss off Donald Trump or the thug “Border Czar” Tom Homan, or the vile Stephen Miller, Trump’s anti-immigration whisperer.

Trump and his people are nibbling around the edges now. Until late in the week, there was reasonable hope that the courts could hold back the worst of the abuses. After the administration slammed 238 migrants on three planes bound for an El Salvador prison, James T. Boasberg, chief judge of the Federal District Court of the District of Columbia instructed the planes to return to the U.S. The administration had cited the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, previously used only three times in U.S. history and always during wartime or after an attack on the U.S. as their justification for the deportations. The judge, who had roomed with Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, released Hillary Clinton's emails, and and is no leftist, is holding fast, so far.

The administration proceeded to ignore the judge’s order and has gone further, calling for his impeachment. It now appears that several of the men on the flights had no criminal records, including a young Venezuelan barber named Franco José Caraballo Tiapa, who was seeking asylum in the U.S. and whose presence was completely legal. Even more disturbing, a gay Venezuelan makeup artist, who also appears to have no criminal record, was sent to El Salvador.

On Friday, March 21, the Trump administration announced that it would be revoking the legal status of hundreds of thousands of people like Tiapa, who took shelter in the U.S. under a temporary measure that offered safety from dangerous countries. This humanitarian program has existed for 70 years.

The same day - note that it’s Friday, certain to fall beneath the radar of most people downshifting for the weekend - reporters at Migrant Insider obtained a memo issued by the administration aimed at intimidating and harassing immigration lawyers, including retroactively, under the now-familiar rubric of fraud. On March 25, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish PhD. student at Tufts University was accosted by masked police and sent to a detention facility. Since then, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that 300 student visas have been revoked.

Kseniia Petrova, a Harvard researcher, has been in detention in Louisiana for a month. Unlike Ozturk, she was not a pro-Palestine activist. She had protested Putin's policies in her native Russia. Her offense when returning to the U.S. from Paris? She hadn't declared frog embryos she was bringing to her mentor at Harvard. It's hard to resist the notion that the Trump administration is doing Putin's work for him on matters great and small.

The net widens. Several U.S. citizens have been stopped by ICE, including one whose pickup sported a “Trump 2024” bumper sticker. The administration is asserting that ICE has the right to search homes without warrants.

One of the things that shocked me during our immigration saga was the latitude given to immigration officials, a latitude matched only by their lack of accountability. For example, State Department consular officials are under no compunction to give reasons for refusing to issue a visa. An applicant can’t appeal a refusal, or effectively challenge a decision in court.

Similarly, U.S. Border and Customs Enforcement officials have broad latitude to deny entry to the U.S. It has been widely reported that a French scientist was prevented from entering the country. At first the story was that border officials found text messages on his phone critical of Trump’s anti-science policies. The administration later told the media that the scientist’s phone had contained information about nuclear programs.

The argument that he was somehow spying on U.S. nuclear programs was hard to believe, since he was trying to enter the U.S., not leave it. Yet CNN’s Jake Tapper amplified the administration’s statement by retweeting it without comment or qualification, apparently without doing any reporting to determine its veracity. That’s the media in 2025.

Increasingly, regular tourists are being clapped into detention centers, including Becky Burke, a 28-year-old British artist from Wales and the Canadian actress and entrepreneur Jasmine Mooney.

"There was no explanation, no warning. One minute, I was in an immigration office talking to an officer about my work visa, which had been approved months before and allowed me, a Canadian, to work in the U.S.," Mooney wrote in the Guardian. “The next, I was told to put my hands against the wall, and patted down like a criminal before being sent to an ICE detention center without the chance to talk to a lawyer.”

Germany recently issued a travel advisory after at least three Germans, including a U.S. permanent resident, were detained when attempting to enter the U.S. One, a female tattoo artist, was placed in solitary confinement for eight days.

Under pressure to ramp up numbers, immigration officers are getting sloppy, Mark Fleming, of the National Immigrant Justice Center’s federal litigation project testified in court, alleging that the rights of 22 people had been violated.

Could journalists be next? As in any relationship, dysfunctional or otherwise, many of us have learned to take Donald Trump at his word. The same goes for his bizarre assemblage of cabinet appointees. Trump has repeatedly threatened to toss reporters in jail and strip major television networks of their broadcast licenses as retribution for coverage he didn't like. These threats go beyond his banning the Associated Press from White House press conferences (while allowing Russian news media Tass to attend).

On the campaign trail in November, Trump pointed to reporters, complaining that the bulletproof glass positioned around him was “ridiculous."

"I have a piece of glass over here, and I don't have a piece of glass there. And I have this piece of glass here, but all we have really over here is the fake news," Trump said, pointing to the glass positioned between him and the head-on riser where the press was located. "And to get me somebody would have to shoot through the fake news. And I don't mind that so much. I don't mind that.”

He repeatedly mocked the media and reporters throughout the rally, calling the media "bloodsuckers."

The autocrats Trump valorizes make a specialty of imprisoning - and in Putin’s case, murdering - reporters. As autocracy takes hold globally, the number of journalists imprisoned and killed is rising. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 122 journalists were killed in 2024, a record. In December 2024, 361 journalists were in prison, the second-highest number since 2022. In Russia, 21 journalists have been murdered since Putin took power in 2000, 13 in contract-style killings, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, including Paul Klebnikov of Forbes magazine.

The abuses by immigration officials are just part of the larger sense of unreality we’re experiencing as our once-vibrant democracy is taken over by a fascist dictatorship with a talent for mendacity from blatant lying to gaslighting to online disinformation. If Putin is Donald Trump’s role model, know that Russia currently holds an estimated 1,000 political prisoners.

Two months into the second Trump administration, I wouldn’t know how to answer if one of my boys asked me again: “When are we leaving?” The boys are full-fledged U.S. citizens now, but I’m no longer sure how much that means. I recently learned that Trump, on his first day in office, signed yet another one of those noxious executive orders, stating that naturalization could be revoked if it had been "unlawfully procured."

Between 1990 and 2017 denaturalization cases averaged just 11 per year. Those numbers rose dramatically in the first Trump administration, according to Migrant Insider. In 2018, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) referred approximately 1,600 cases for potential denaturalization, a 600% increase from previous years. By 2019, ICE had announced plans to review 700,000 naturalized citizens' files for possible discrepancies.

The Trump playbook has already been used for immigration applications. Critics say the administration is targeting individuals over minor paperwork discrepancies, including omissions on immigration forms and past removal orders issued decades ago. Hoda Muthana’s case might be complicated and, to many of us, ambiguous. Screwing up one blank on an immigration form is not.

Anything can be taken away. Citizenship. Democracy. Freedom. On a personal level, identity.

During the five years I spent feeling more utterly powerless than I can remember ever feeling in my life, I often was reminded of an obscure film I’d seen in the 90s, A Pure Formality, with Roman Polanski as a police inspector and Gerard Depardieu as a novelist accused of murder. Most of the film takes place in a rather surreal and unpleasant interrogation room. Lights flicker. Rain leaks from the ceiling.

“The bulky, disheveled Mr. Depardieu claims to be a famous writer,” wrote a New York Times reviewer. ‘My name is Onoff,’ he says. ‘And mine is Leonardo da Vinci,’ answers the impeccable Mr. Polanski, in a conservative suit and slicked-back hair….The inspector seems to know Onoff's novels better than Onoff himself….The interrogation forces Onoff to examine his life and his identity. Maybe he is guilty; maybe he is crazy; maybe he is not really Onoff….”

And maybe, just maybe, we are not America. Not anymore.

This meme has been going around. So I’m not alone in worrying about this.

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