Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 99-0, offered a gleeful defense of the fascism on display this week with the arrest of Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk. Ozturk, who was here on a student visa that the government apparently revoked because she signed her name to op-ed calling for her university to recognize the genocide in Gaza and divest from Israel, was snatched off the street in Massachusetts by masked agents; she has been accused of no crime.
“We revoked her visa… once you’ve lost your visa, you’re no longer legally in the United States,” Rubio said at a press conference in Guyana, part of a three-country tour he is currently on. He did not discuss why such a violation couldn’t be handled with a call or a letter and a demand to leave within some number of days, rather than a Secret Police-style display of thuggery and a 1,500-mile flight to a Louisiana ICE detention center.
“If you come into the US as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don’t want it,” he continued, where, again, the “ruckus” in question was, as far as anyone can tell, signing a name to an op-ed, in a country where free speech protections extend to everyone, citizen or not. “We don’t want it in our country,” said Rubio, who, again, and again and again and again, was confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 99-0. “Go back and do it in your country.”
An attempt to discover where in the Constitution or US statutory law the Ruckus Exemption to the First Amendment can be found has so far been unfruitful. We will update if anything pops up.
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