WHEN agents from the Department of Homeland Security abruptly arrested and removed former Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil from his New York City home last week, they revoked his legally acquired green card that affords him permanent residency in the US. Then he simply disappeared.
 
His wife, eight months pregnant, was told he was in detention in Elizabeth, New Jersey. When she went to visit, he wasn’t there. This is the country we live in now, where people simply vanish.
 
If we are waiting for the Democrats to save us from this latest Gestapo-like lurch toward autocracy, we must think again. For some, radical defiance means picking out precisely the right colour of pink to wear during President Trump’s address to Congress. Or silently flashing small signs on paddles stating the not-so-scary obvious, like “Musk steals,” “False” or “That’s a lie.”
 
One congresswoman held a handwritten sign that read, “This is not normal.” It is far, far worse than that.
 
The limp response prompted comedy news host, Stephen Colbert, to make a sign of his own. “TRY DOING SOMETHING,” it said. “That is how you save democracy: by quietly dissenting,” mocked Colbert, host of The Late Show. “Or bidding on an antique tea set. It was hard to tell what was going on.”
 
Texas Democrat Al Green was alone in displaying enough guts and principle to disrupt Trump’s falsehood-filled rant. Waving his gold-handled cane in the air, the 77-year-old African-American congressman loudly reprimanded the administration’s attempts to gut Medicaid, a healthcare lifeline for low-income families. “You have no mandate!” he cried, before being ejected from the chamber.
 
None of his fellow Democrats walked out with him. All of them should have.
 
Green was later censured by the US House. To their eternal shame, 10 Democrats joined the Republicans in voting to reprimand him.
 
Former Obama adviser and longtime Democratic consultant David Axelrod called Green’s actions “despicable” while praising the choice of pro-Israel Congresswoman Elissa Slotkin to deliver the Democrats’ reply to Trump’s address. “I liked Elissa Slotkin’s speech. I think that’s where Democrats should go,” Axelrod said.
 
It is a party cannibalising itself and utterly lost.
 
“Saving our country from the cruel and vicious dictatorship seizing our government can only come from the people,” wrote longtime free speech advocate and activist Ralph Nader, who has twice run for US president.

Change will come from “Americans of all political backgrounds who show up and speak up at rallies, preferably outside local congressional offices (with their senators and representatives invited) in rural, suburban, and urban communities nationwide.”
 
Voices will also need to be raised on behalf of the disappeared, whether it’s immigrants falsely accused of serious crimes whisked away to detention centres and deported, or exponents of free speech like Khalil, who has been stripped of his legal right to live and work in the country.
 
Ominously, a petition started online calling for Khalil’s immediate release comes with this warning to potential signatories: “If you are not a citizen, please do not provide your real name in the ‘First Name’ and ‘Last Name’ fields for your security.”
 
Khalil, a Palestinian who has since graduated from Columbia University, was one of the leaders of the student encampment there last year, where students — including Jewish students — protested in support of a ceasefire and for an end to Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine.
 
The university dealt harshly with the student protesters at the time but last week was stripped of a $400 million federal grant by the Trump administration, which, ironically, accused the university of a failure to root out anti-semitism and stop “persistent harassment of Jewish students.”

Khalil’s lawyer Amy E Greer described his arrest as part of “the US government’s open repression of student activism and political speech, specifically targeting students at Columbia University for criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza. The US government has made clear that they will use immigration enforcement as a tool to suppress that speech.”
 
On Monday a New York judge approved a petition for habeas corpus filed by Khalil’s lawyers that will require all parties including Khalil to appear in court on Wednesday.
 
Trump had earlier praised Khalil’s arrest, falsely calling him “a radical foreign pro-Hamas student” while threatening to hunt down other student protesters. “We will find, apprehend and deport these terrorist sympathisers,” he wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social. Thousands rallied on the streets of New York on Monday demanding Khalil’s release.

The Trump-Musk-Vance troika continues to run rampant, although a slew of lawsuits have halted some of the more extreme executive orders. But finding answers to quell this rampage toward fascism have been elusive.

Recently, a progressive friend only half-jokingly pondered whether we needed a military coup, but Trump has since moved to pre-empt that.
 
“Trump fired top military generals without cause, pushed out the chief lawyers for the three military services and replaced them with heel-clicking loyalists ready to obey any illegal order in violation of the Nuremberg rules,” Nader wrote.
 
“Remember that the unstable Trump has his finger on the nuclear trigger.”
 
Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.