Let me start with a message to my wife. SORRY!!! I apologise in advance for everything you are about to read.
My more sensible half, you see, is a US citizen, who keeps telling me (a green card holder) that I should stop making jokes about getting sent to a detention centre or deported.
Not only are my jokes inappropriate; my wife seems to think they’re suspicious.“I think you secretly want to get deported so you can take a break from childcare and have a lie-in,” she said the other day. I can’t remember what prompted this allegation – perhaps a dire knock-knock joke about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials – but it’s obviously nonsense. I read that Guardian article about theBritish artist who was detainedby US authorities because of a visa mix-up and she was woken up every day at 5:30am and given an Ice-cold potato. There are no lie-ins at Club Fed!
Look, it should go without saying that nothing that is happening in the US at the moment is remotely funny. The fact that Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil wasrobbed of seeing his first childbeing born because he’s locked in a cell forprotesting against a genocideis not funny. The fact that a judge has said thatthe Trump administrationjust deported a two-year-old US citizen to Honduras with “no meaningful process” is not funny. The fact that Trump is disappearing people to a prison in El Salvador – and threatening to send “homegrown” Americans there next – is not funny.
But while the US’s slide into authoritarianism is no laughing matter, I’m afraid I can’t stop making jokes. It is a compulsion, a sickness. It is simply how I cope with terrible situations. Although, honestly, I’m not coping particularly well. It feels as if everything has been unrelentingly bleak for a very long time now. It’s been over 18 months of watching helplessly as starving kids get slaughtered inGaza, 100 days of Trump inflicting chaos and cruelty in the US. My nerves are shot.
In an attempt to brighten things up, my wife and I have been thinking about where we might take our four-year-old this summer. But even a summer holiday isn’t straightforward any more. First, there’s the question of whether it’s too much of a risk to even leave the country as a green-card holder. I reached out to a few contacts who work in immigration law and civil liberties, expecting them to tell me not to be so dramatic and I’d be fine. But they all sort of went: “Ehhh, deportation is definitely a possibility under this unpredictable and lawless regime! You should be prepared! Even flying domestically carries risks!”So now, even though I am in the US perfectly legally, even though I have done nothing wrong (apart from the crime of being Palestinian), summer holiday planning involves extensive risk assessment – tickets, money, passports, a lawyer’s number in case things go south.
Across the US, millions of people are making calculations like mine. Should I leave the country or not? Should I go to a protest or not? Should I delete my mean tweets about Trump in case a guard looks through my phone at the border? Should I carry a burner phone when re-entering the US –something foreign journalistsare now being advised to do? You can see, amid all these individual calculations, amid all the self-censorship and self-policing, how easy it is for fear to spread and authoritarianism to take hold.
While I may sound cavalier about all this, I am taking my situation seriously. I am lining up possible lawyers in case the worst happens. And I’m coming up with a comms plan. By which I mean I have picked out a cute picture of my dog for my wife to give to the press if I do get detained, in order to foster public sympathy. My dog is a scruffylittle 8lb mongrel called Rascalwho has lost a few teeth in his old age and whose tongue lolls out of his mouth. He has a face that would melt even the Trumpiest heart and he is my secret weapon. It’s very hard to get many Americans to give a damn about Arabs, but dogs are a different story. People will always go to battle for a dog.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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