The defining feature of American democracy, you could be forgiven for having thought, is that you can say what you think without having to fear that you will be arrested, locked up or deported for it.

The United States isn’t unique in its commitment to this idea, but this country has taken it unusually seriously. No law has been repudiated as decisively by the US supreme court as the Sedition Act of 1798, which made it a crime to publish false or scandalous criticism of government officials.

American newspapers, unlike their counterparts in most other nations, can print governmental secrets without fear that the security services will ransack their newsrooms. The first amendment has been understood to protect a very broad range of political speech, including, importantly, by immigrants. As a consequence of all of this, there are – or there were, until very recently – many things one could say in New York that one couldn’t say in Istanbul or Mumbai, or even in Berlin or London.

The Trump administration’s roundup of students who protested Israel’s bombardment of Gaza marks an astonishing, radical break with what one might justifiably think of as the central American idea. Immigration agents force a PhD student into an unmarked van in Somerville, Massachusetts,

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