NYT / Masha Gessen: Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived.

[Dennis Donovan]

NYT / Masha Gessen - Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived. (Gift link)

April 2, 2025, 5:04 a.m. ET
By M. Gessen
Opinion Columnist



“It’s the unmarked cars,” a friend who grew up under an Argentine dictatorship said. He had watched the video of the Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil’s abduction. In the video, which Khalil’s wife recorded, she asks for the names of the men in plainclothes who handcuffed her husband.

“We don’t give our name,” one responds. “Can you please specify what agency is taking him?” she pleads. No response. We know now that Khalil was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security.

Those of us who have lived in countries terrorized by a secret police force can’t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity. “I never realized until this moment how much fear I carried with me from my childhood in Communist Romania,” another friend, the literary scholar Marianne Hirsch, told me. “Arrests were arbitrary and every time the doorbell rang, I started to shiver.”

It’s the catastrophic interruption of daily life, as when a Tufts University graduate student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was grabbed on a suburban street by half a dozen plainclothes agents, most of them masked. The security camera video of that arrest shows Ozturk walking, looking at her phone, perhaps to check the address where she was supposed to meet her friends for dinner that night, when an agent appears in front of her. She says something — asks something — struggling to control her voice, and within seconds she is handcuffed and placed in an unmarked car.

It’s the forced mass transports of immigrants. These are not even deportations, in the way we typically think of them. Rather than being sent to their country of origin, Venezuelans were sent to El Salvador, where they are being imprisoned, indefinitely, without due process. It’s the sight of men being marched in formation, their heads shaved, hundreds of people yanked from their individual lives to be reduced to an undifferentiated mass. It’s the sight, days later, of the secretary of homeland security posing against the background of men in cages and threatening more people with the same punishment.

/snip

[Wingus Dingus]

1. America as we knew it is dead. We have become what we used to stand against.

I am glad my immigrant grandparents and great-grandparents can't know of what became of their promised land.

[2naSalit]

2. From now on...

Last edited Wed Apr 2, 2025, 02:41 PM - Edit history (1)

I'm packing bear spray just in case I'm mistaken for someone else.

[erronis]

12. I was going to say "That'll get you killed" and then I remember that the Jan 6th "patriots" used it.

OK, then!

[Solly Mack]

3. K&R

[Hekate]

4. There's a photo I've seen hundreds of times in my life, must have been in all my childhood textbooks...

Ordinary people are being herded along a street — there’s a small terrified girl out front. Who are they? Jews. Who is herding them? Nazis. Where are they going? Death camps. What is the transport? Cattle cars.

Tried just now to find that photo online — but there are so many photos.

When I was growing up in the years after the death camps were liberated by American soldiers, I thought I knew who we were, and that we were the good guys.

That prison in El Salvador where no one can be found or returned… the land in the US already earmarked for concentration camps… the masked agents in black, no names, no patches, no ID… the nightmare bus trips and charter flights…

Masha Gessen is so right.

[republianmushroom]

5. It is here.

Our Police State Has Arrived.

[TommyT139]

6. Gessen knows.

M. Gessen has been targeted by Putin in the past. And as a queer nonbinary person, an outspoken journalist and author, progressive academic, and someone who has a family, they are in trumpist cross hairs too. I hope they are either out of the US at this point or ready to go.

If people want to repost this, without the gifting info that leads back to whomever, here are links:

Original URL:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/02/opinion/trump-ice-immigrants.html

Archive link:
https://archive.is/MQidn

[hlthe2b]

7. I can scarcely imagine someone with more targets aimed at them--beyond Putin and Trump's MAGATs...

For Gessen's sake, I'd suggest relocating to Canada if they have not already.

[ancianita]

8. Gessen names the app that, imo, needs banning.

It’s the lists. More than anything else, in fact, it’s the lists.
A private company has launched an app called ICERAID, billed as a “protocol that delegates intelligence-gathering tasks to citizens that would otherwise be undertaken by law enforcement agencies.” The app promises rewards for “capturing and uploading images of criminal illegal alien activity” and possibly even bigger rewards for self-reporting — for adding oneself to the ICERAID registry if one is “an honest, hard-working undocumented immigrant with no criminal history.” The app, in other words, combines two time-tested secret-police techniques: incentivizing some people to denounce their neighbors and inducing others to add themselves to registries.

[Hekate]

18. This. And don't forget that Texas has bounties of $10K for pregnant women planning to leave the state

Anyone can report.

“It’s the lists.”

[ancianita]

20. Right? And "It's the apps." Another reason why apps that (in)directly result in human harm should be

taken to court and banned as a proven threat to public safety.

[dchill]

9. ICE. A federal agency...

... that can be used to break federal laws. Way cool. Way Trumpy. Way Musky.

[aggiesal]

10. I now carry my Passport Card, anywhere I go, for this reason. n/t

[Figarosmom]

11. They did this during protests

In his last term in office and nothing was done about it. So now they feel they have free reign.

Don't know maybe if something had been done then we wouldn't be in this nightmare now. Any of us could be next, for our posts here or any other site ( I'm sure he's got someone monitoring and making lists) go out grocery shopping and end up with a bag over our heading the back of a van.

[rubbersole]

13. No doubt.

The pushback has to be loud and public. The voting registrations are probably already in doge algorithms. April 5th protests need to be overwhelming. These nazis are testing the waters. Gotta stop them now.

[erronis]

15. Of course what should have been done was to find him guilty and put away for good.

But putin and others had already bought so many in congress and the courts that he slithered out.

[Tickle]

14. It hasn't even been 100 days--and already the fear is palpable.

I work in addiction recovery, and recently I sat with a client whose emotional state was difficult to ignore. At first, I considered whether she might need a crisis intervention, but as I listened, I realized what she needed most was space to be heard. So I let her speak—angrily, urgently, and with trembling hands.

She’s a young African American woman originally from Alabama, though how she ended up here remains unclear. Her words came fast and heavy. She told me, with certainty and dread, that after April 20th, 2025, she would be enslaved again. That white police officers in Alabama were going to imprison her children. That Russia, China, and Iran were planning to overtake America—and that she had seen preparations while serving overseas. Seven ships, she said, were being readied in Africa, destined to come to America to "save the Black."

To an outside observer, these claims may sound delusional. But what struck me most was not the content of her beliefs—it was the raw emotion behind them. Her voice rose, shaking with a mixture of anger, desperation, and unrelenting fear. She wasn’t just talking. She was sounding an alarm only she could hear clearly. She had story after story, all strung together by deep, lived anxiety.

And as I sat there listening, I realized: I wasn’t afraid of her—I was afraid of the world she was describing. I was afraid of tomorrow.

I’m writing this not to dramatize or devalue her experience, but to reflect on the collective distress many people are carrying. Fear, whether grounded in fact or shaped by trauma, is real. It's loud. It moves through the body. And in some communities, it's become generational—etched into memory like code into DNA.

It hasn't even been 100 days. And already, the cracks are showing.

Imagine four years

[erronis]

16. Thanks for that post. The raw feelings are out there, everywhere.

Some may be better able to push down the fears. Some of us may be more sensitive, attuned, and afraid.

[Paladin]

17. I hope Gessen is sharing all this with her fellow NY Times opinion writers.

Because it's pretty obvious that some of them wouldn't even recognize or acknowledge the presence of a right-wing police state in this country---regardless of how painfully obvious it is to us.

[Hekate]

19. I've seen her on MSNBC many times, and she hasn't been shy about speaking her mind there

[Paladin]

21. I've never had a problem with Gessen. (nt)