At the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, I warned that the president’s mass deportation plan posed a serious threat to American citizens’ rights and safety. Long before Trump, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had a habit of accidentally arresting, detaining, and even deporting US citizens, and there was little doubt that a massively expanded version of this deportation program would end up scooping up far more US citizens by mistake.
That is in fact what has happened over the past few months, with ICE repeatedly capturing and even banishing American citizens from the country, including a four-year-old battling cancer who was thrown out without any medication. But the situation is much graver than this, because far from simply mistakenly sweeping US citizens up in a dragnet, evidence is building that the immigration enforcement system is deliberately targeting US citizens, particularly politically active Americans who are critical of the Trump administration — US citizens like popular left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.
As first reported by User Mag, the Substack started by former Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz, Piker was held and questioned for hours by agents of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) upon returning to the country from France. Hasan later outlined his interrogation in a forty-minute-long video, in which he described being questioned about his work and political beliefs by an Iraqi-American CBP agent he described as “cordial” and friendly, and who said he understood his opposition to US wars.
According to Piker, agents appeared to know who he was, and their questions soon turned to interrogations of his political beliefs, including repeated questioning about his thoughts on Hamas and the Houthis, his views on US foreign policy, and his bans from the streaming platform Twitch, one of which came after he had said that “America deserved 9/11,” a comment he later expressed regret for….
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
