In another thread and some recent conversations on my personal account, I talked a little bit about why the Trump regime's actions in court signal that they have no intention of ceasing their ideological policing of anti-genocide, pro-Palestine critics, through the federally-controlled immigration process. As if to demonstrate the point, the US government has deported an Australian blogger returning to the country, expressly for his writings about Israel's genocide in Gaza, and anti-genocide student protests in the United States.
Australian deported from US says he was ‘targeted’ due to writing on pro-Palestine student protests
"The 33-year-old said he was “clearly targeted for politically motivated reasons” and said officials spent more than 30 minutes questioning him about his views on Israel and Palestine including his “thoughts on Hamas”.
Kitchen said officials asked him for his “thoughts about the conflict in a very broad sense”, including about student protesters, what Israel “should have done differently” and “how I would resolve the conflict”.
“It was quite an in-depth probing of my views on the war,” he said.
Kitchen said he was deported and landed back in Melbourne on Saturday morning.
“The CBP explicitly said to me, the reason you have been detained is because of your writing on the Columbia student protests,” he told Guardian Australia on Sunday. The US Department of Homeland Security was contacted for comment."
To be clear, Kitchen is not a resident of the United States and nothing CBP did is strictly illegal; it's not like they kidnapped him and threw him in private prison cage, as they have done to anti-genocide protestors and critics in America where immigration law made it possible (but not legal.) However the blogger's testimony makes it clear that US immigration officials knew who he was in advance, wanted to grill him on his writing about the genocide and anti-genocide protests on college campuses, and denied him entry for the purely ideological reason that he doesn't support Trump's genocide or fascist repression of student protestors. The investigating officials made up some bullshit about there being evidence of drug use on Kitchen's phone, but their laser-like focus on his writing makes it abundantly clear that this was fascist ideological policing.
Folks, let's be clear here; Kitchen is a guy with a conscience who maintains a small blog. He is not a threat to the US government, and there was no valid reason to deny him entry to the United States or deport him whatsoever. Immigration enforcement under the Trump regime is clearly about keeping the kind of people Trump himself doesn't like out of the country, and has nothing to do with the law, national security, or keeping us safe.
This episode brings us back to something I was talking about when immigration pigs harassed and detained Hasan Piker at the Chicago airport, in that it speaks to the scope of the Trump regime's ideological policing. These fascist pigs are tracking Twitch streamers and guys writing blogs with a few thousand regular readers (folks not unlike myself) and the only reason this is all focused on immigrants and foreign visitors to the United States is because that's the part of the government Trump more or less controls completely. The regime thinks opposing the regime itself is a crime, and as soon as they can make this ideological policing an operational program domestically, you can bet that they're coming for American-born critics in the same ways, and for the same reasons.
#Fascism #Trump #CBP #Immigration #AlistairKitchen #IdeologicalPolicing #MassSurveillance #Panopticon #PoliceState #Gaza #Genocide
