I used to be a political prisoner in Egypt. I didn’t need to turn into one once more in America.
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US Immigration and Customs Enforcement brokers knock on the door of a residence throughout a multi-agency focused enforcement operation in Chicago, Illinois, on Sunday, January 26, 2025.
(Christopher Dilts / Bloomberg by way of Getty Photos)
I was a political prisoner for over six years in Egypt. Final week, I fled the US to flee the opportunity of the identical destiny.
After Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil was kidnapped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) brokers in entrance of his college condo in New York Metropolis, I locked myself inside my residence for a month. As an Egyptian worldwide scholar whose identify had appeared on one of many Zionist doxxing websites being utilized by the Trump administration to assist decide its deportation targets, I knew to anticipate the worst. When the administration revoked the primary F-1 visa at my college, my attorneys gently however unequivocally advised me that the query had doubtless turn into now not if I’d be arrested however when.
I had seen it coming. I had watched the horrific footage of Khalil’s arrest—the shock etched on his face, the unmarked automotive, the officers’ imperious we-do-not-give-our-names. Khalil’s Habibti, it’s tremendous, as they wrenched him away from his terrorized, eight-months-pregnant spouse (she has since given start to their baby whereas Khalil languishes in jail). Different arrests swiftly adopted. I stay haunted by Rümeysa Öztürk’s stricken, darting eyes because the brokers closed in on her on the road—the normalcy rupturing into terror, an unmaking I knew too nicely.
The hallmark of authoritarianism isn’t the knock on the door—it’s life underneath the fixed concern of its arrival.
Two weeks into my self-imposed lockdown, I recalled jail’s inertia: life on standby on my farsha—the prisoner’s sleeping spot, made from two prison-issue blankets—plastic luggage at all times packed by my head, prepared for the subsequent uprooting. That very same agitation simmered underneath my pores and skin as I sat in my hole Pittsburgh condo, dismantled into six bulging suitcases I had packed within the first week of my lockdown. I lined them up by my desk, my flight one click on away.
I ordered groceries underneath a faux e-mail and solely unlocked my door after midnight to retrieve them. Once I needed to run two pressing errands, pals got here with automobiles, scanned the block for suspicious folks or autos, then pulled as much as the constructing’s again door. I slipped out and in like contraband.
For a month, I opened my eyes every morning and reached for my cellphone. I refreshed my profile on the Zionist doxxing web site, then googled my identify with the “previous 24 hours” filter. I exhaled when no new focusing on marketing campaign appeared.
Present Challenge
With every new arrest, I rushed to my desk, reopened the flight reserving tab—then hesitated. It wasn’t only a departure I used to be weighing; it was the abandonment of a life I had painstakingly constructed towards the situations of my exile—a life that just about started to resemble a house. I had solid a group whose love burned with the type of depth usually solely born of shared oppression. My memoir, written over years inside jail and in exile, was finally as a result of come out subsequent 12 months. My MFA commencement loomed simply weeks away. It crushed me, with one life already deserted once I fled my nation, to relinquish all of it once more on the cusp of end result. But the horizon earlier than me was not merely deportation—it was a lifetime in jail if I had been shipped again to Egypt.
On certainly one of my final mornings within the US, a pointy breeze slipped by means of the cracked window by my desk. I stood and walked to the sofa, the place the one three unpacked items of winter clothes lay in disarray. I reached for a unfastened, night-black sweatshirt that introduced me consolation—however paused. Rain drummed steadily towards the glass. I turned and picked the grey Pitt hoodie to its proper as an alternative.
I spotted thatI’d calculated, with out pondering, what I’d have to be carrying if ICE’s knock got here immediately.
I went to my laptop computer and booked my flight.
Over the previous weeks, many sympathizers have chosen to not label Khalil, Öztürk, and different focused college students as political prisoners, opting as an alternative to body the problem round First Modification rights. There’s been an overreach, they’d say. A violation of due course of, a disregard for correct channels in imposing the rule of legislation. However political prisoners—in the US?
Setting apart the truth that there have at all times been political prisoners in the US, I’m ready to know what we’re taking a look at. And let me let you know—it’s the similar worn textbook.
The problem will not be that Mahmoud Khalil holds a inexperienced card, neither is it solely that his arrest violated “due course of,” although many liberal People certainly want us to take challenge with solely that. The problem is that Khalil and the others who’ve been kidnapped in latest weeks are being jailed as a result of they had been dissident protesters, scholar organizers, op-ed authors, and anti-genocide activists. In different phrases, they’ve been focused for his or her political opinions. They’re political prisoners.
America and its folks have by no means hesitated to use the label of political incarceration to our area. To many, the time period is reserved for our nations, lands afar underneath authoritarian rule, the so-called barbaric non-democracies. The reluctance amongst many People—together with those that take into account themselves allies to these of us being hunted—to name a factor what it’s is in itself a type of supremacy.
No authoritarian authorities labels its political incarcerations as such. In Egypt, the army dictatorship additionally asserts that it doesn’t have political prisoners. As a substitute, it revives out of date assembly-ban legal guidelines and ratifies new ones to legalize the method.
Then comes the terrorism handbook. After the 2013 army coup, the Ikhwan—the Muslim Brotherhood—had been swiftly designated a terrorist group, their transformation into enemies of the state to be eradicated sealed in a single day. Ikhwan had been massacred and imprisoned by the tens of hundreds, adopted by state-sponsored language crafted to grease the atrocities: liquidation of terrorists, terrorism courts, and a conflict on terror. Quickly, nobody was secure: Leftists had been labeled Ikhwan. Liberals, Ikhwan. Seculars, Ikhwan. Ultras soccer followers, Ikhwan. And nonetheless, none had been acknowledged as political prisoners. For if all opposition is Ikhwan, and all Ikhwan are terrorists, then 60,000 political prisoners stop to exist.
Within the US, the language is equivalent, copied from the identical textbook. Government orders and proposed legal guidelines cloak political incarceration in legality. It’s not political imprisonment; it’s “Defending the US from Overseas Terrorists” and “Extra Measures to Fight Anti-Semitism.” Very like Egypt’s cornerstone anti-assembly legislation, an archaic British colonial legislation from 1914, initially designed to crush Egyptian dissent underneath occupation, the US Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 grants the secretary of state sweeping powers to revoke visas from foreigners deemed a menace and order their deportation. On the time of its inception, it aimed to focus on Jewish Holocaust survivors suspected of being Soviet spies. Each legal guidelines are relics of a bygone period, resurrected to serve the identical function: McCarthyist witch hunts.
In fact, a witch hunt wants witches. Thus, by calculated design and linguistic warfare, the Trump administration has labored to flip its political prisoners into radical international pro-terror agitators, orchestrating actions tied to US-designated terrorist teams. Thus, it turns into not solely acceptable, however mandatory, to fade them at midnight and ship them throughout the nation for disposal.
That is exactly how political incarceration has at all times functioned.
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Many People watching this unfold declare that the US is descending into fascism. We whose our bodies have at all times borne the brunt of this nation’s violence know higher. The US will not be “descending” into fascism. The US is a nation constructed on the genocide of its Indigenous inhabitants, the enslavement of Black folks, and over a century of racial segregation. The present terror ICE is unleashing on immigrant communities builds on a long-standing historical past of racist, xenophobic immigration insurance policies and enforcement.
By means of its international coverage, the US has lengthy been a serious investor in authoritarianism, whether or not instantly wrecking our international locations or outsourcing the brutal work to native army proxies. Its obsession with sustaining an inside façade of colour blindness and superior values is comparatively latest. However as Christina Sharpe says in Abnormal Notes: “The equipment of whiteness always deploys violence—and in a mirror-register, always manufactures marvel, shock, and innocence in relation to that violence.”
Widespread
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Folks like me have spent our total lives on the receiving finish of US imperialism, its bloody international coverage rooted in our subjugation. As an Egyptian, I’ve skilled firsthand how the US has been one of many chief architects in putting in and propping up Egypt’s dictators—the third-largest recipient of US army help—to serve US pursuits in securing the Israeli occupation’s security, and preserving US regional hegemony. The US has persistently employed authorized and logical contortions to proceed bolstering Egypt’s army regime. In 2019, Trump even referred to as Sisi his “favourite dictator.”
Our persecuted fled to the US from prisons, wars, and bloodshed, the stomach of the beast a refuge from its claws tearing at our homelands. However immediately, we relive the very realities we fled: huddling in pals’ properties, recoiling at each knock on the door, erasing social media, wiping telephones of political traces, deleting proof of activism, leaving directions for attorneys and family members, and writing nameless opinion items in concern of state retaliation. The beast has merely turned its claws as soon as extra inward, thrashing inside its personal guts, its starvation to eradicate the “undesirables” lastly surpassing its urge to protect the veneer of freedom.
I suspected I must depart once I curled up at residence, watching the prevailing rallying cry throughout social media: that they’ll come for residents subsequent—not that they’ve already come for us. For a big variety of indignant People, the panic over free speech and First Modification rights is however a concern of discovering themselves caught on the flawed finish of the bruise. On this nation, our crushed nonresident alien our bodies have a tendency to carry no worth besides as an ominous signal for what may befall an American, our cuffs a mere foreshadowing of hypothetical ones round a US citizen’s wrist.
Whereas our persons are being picked off one after the other, I write to you from my new exile to let you know—it’s the similar worn textbook. It started with Mahmoud Khalil, a check case, a measure of how far they will push. Then, Leqaa Kordia, Rümeysa Öztürk, Badar Khan Suri. When met with nothing greater than petitions, social media outrage, and containable protests, others have adopted. What erupts after is a tide of repression. The names will cascade sooner than petitions might be drafted, swifter than symbols might be memorialized. The dimensions of mass detentions and deportations will overwhelm even true allies. And if it was tolerated when it had been just one, it is going to be tolerated because the numbers swell. It can settle into the brand new rhythm of life, punctuated by the occasional shared publish that soothes a conscience.
As for myself, I enterprise into a brand new unknown, my life packed in luggage because it had been for years in jail, in search of a brand new ghourba that can take my exiled physique—at the very least for some time. By means of all of it, I remorse nothing.
How can something evaluate to the infected arm of 19-year-old Shaaban al-Dalou, hooked to an IV, reaching towards one thing because it burns into stillness? To 7-year-old Sidra Hassouna’s small, shredded physique hanging from the ruins of her household’s shelter after a US-funded Israeli air strike? To six-year-old Hind Rajab, martyred after surviving an occupation-bombed automobile that killed her total household—her ultimate phrases: “I’m so scared, please come. Come take me. Please, will you come?”
I way back determined to shout into each microphone till it was snatched away, changed by dangling cuffs. When that occurs, I do know it’s time: I roll my farsha, haul my luggage, and enter exile anew.
Abdelrahman ElGendy
Abdelrahman ElGendy is an Egyptian author and translator and the writer of the forthcoming Huna, a memoir exploring the politics of dissent and erasure by means of his six-year political incarceration in Egypt.
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