Sitting around a table in New York with a group of women celebrating the big birthday of a friend, I was smacked in the face by what it feels like to live in a society where education, status and citizenship are no longer a guarantee of safety from arrest, imprisonment or, worst of all, deportation.
I could smell the fear coming off the women – fear of reprisal for saying anything that goes against what is considered to be “acceptable” speech; fear of being cancelled, of having work contracts summarily ended. And in one case, of having one’s immigration status revoked and being sent back to a country where you have not lived.
Welcome to Trumpian America, the land of the not-so-free and, certainly, the not-so-brave. The women at that table, all academics, all lecturers in their specific field of law, all from universities dotted across this vast country, had a story to tell, all of them tinged with the undertones of bullying, all laced with huge threads of trepidation.
The immigration law lecturer described how head-shakingly perplexed she is daily, as laws that were on the statute books last week might not apply this week. She tells how impossible it is to teach, to guide her students through the shifting quicksand parameters of immigration law.
What the inalienable rights of citizens were a month ago might no longer apply. She is at sea. How do you impart knowledge when the bottom has fallen out of what is, or rather was, written down as the benchmark for that particular subject?
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is plucking people off the street every day, taking them to detention centres. People are randomly being asked to prove they are legally allowed to be in the US.
It reminds me of our own troubled history, when black South Africans had to carry a “dompas”, the document that controlled black people’s movement during apartheid.
One of the lecturers witnessed a Spanish-speaking student being carted off by ICE. Sadly, she reported that nobody demurred, that people scattered for fear of being taken too. If you look Latino or Hispanic, she said, and are heard speaking Spanish, you are an obvious target.
One of the women adopted her son from a South American country 26 years ago. The immigration lawyer warned he was not necessarily safe from deportation because the requirements for adult adopted children have shifted. The worried mother was reassured that he was not on the high-risk radar, so probably safe. For now.
Her plaintive cry: imagine living with the sword of Damocles hanging over your head.
Teaching a course on executive power (which includes a section on the use and abuse of presidential power) at a “red state” university in the American South has silenced Professor V, who says she censors herself daily.
Her fear of retaliation is acute and, by her own admission, she has too much to lose if she is cancelled or fired from her senior position.
Six days after Charlie Kirk, the right-wing political activist and media personality who founded the conservative organisation Turning Point USA in 2012, was murdered, renowned actor Robert Redford died.
During one of her lectures, the professor wanted to include – as an example of the checks and balances that the media (used to) play in keeping presidents honest – the 1976 film All the President’s Men. In it, Redford plays Bob Woodward, one of The Washington Post reporters who brought down the corrupt administration of President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal.
But, instead of weaving into her lecture to her students the fact that Redford, her screen hero, had died, she checked herself and stayed silent. Why? She was afraid she’d be accused of naming a movie star but not the slain Kirk.
A few years ago, I visited the Jewish Museum in Berlin, a building whose architecture instils a sense of dread as you enter, where the story of the Holocaust is laid bare in all its horror and sadness.
One of the exhibitions is a room filled with sheets of white paper suspended from ceiling to floor, detailing the daily exclusions and restrictions imposed on Jewish people in Nazi Germany – over years.
A series of escalating laws and decrees stripped Jews of their rights, segregated them from society and ultimately paved the way for the Holocaust. Restrictions affected every aspect of Jewish life, including citizenship, employment, property and personal freedoms.
That feels prescient. People go about their daily lives as normal, only there is an undercurrent of unease. People talk about how uncertain things are all the time. That’s here in New York. I am told by a woman who teaches in California that it is much worse there.
And so, people are afraid, censoring themselves, keeping opinions to themselves.
There is also the fear of doxing – a term I’d never heard, which means “the action or process of searching for and publishing private or identifying information about a particular individual on the internet, typically with malicious intent”.
People are outing each other, republishing old social media posts that alert the powers that be to “unsavoury” government-criticising posts that are seen as threatening enough to question their authors.
It feels reminiscent of the Salem witch trials – the hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts in the 1600s that resulted in executions through hanging.
Widespread fear, paranoia, religious extremism and social tensions sparked when young girls accused local women of witchcraft. The crisis, fuelled by a rigid Puritan society, community conflict and a belief in the devil, created a context in which mass hysteria and false accusations flourished.
2025 America has a familiar feel.
I felt a chill as I heard stories of the rescinding of rights people thought they had – now, in 2025.
Free speech is one of those. Comedians are coming under fire for lampooning the president. Along with him, people are taking to social media to demonise them and call for them to have their contracts cancelled. It happened with late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, who – due to a public outcry against the death of free speech – was brought back.
I was in a gridlocked Manhattan when the UN General Assembly sat for its 80th session, when President Donald Trump spoke for an hour, telling the UN how ineffectual it was, scolding world leaders, praising himself for ending wars, calling the mayor of London “a terrible mayor, terrible, terrible mayor” who wants to introduce shariah (law).
This was after he’d complained about an escalator that switched off while he was on it – promising to get the secret service to investigate and charge the pranksters involved. His teleprompter didn’t work – more firing threats. Speakers had been tampered with so he was inaudible in the large hall – more calls for jail time.
Is it any wonder that people are afraid?
And yet, there are people who stand on bridges with signs. It seems like a feeble protest, but as one of the women around that table said, everyone does what they can, what’s comfortable for them. DM
This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.
