“When privacy becomes a privilege, people disappear.”
Image via Pikrepo
On the 25th of March, Rümeysa Öztürk, a doctoral student at Tufts University in Massachusetts, was arrested by masked, plainclothes US immigration officials outside her home. Öztürk was detained just over 2 weeks after Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University postgraduate, had been arrested by immigration officers inside his university housing on the 9th of March. Despite Öztürk’s valid student visa and Khalil’s permanent US residency, both students were sent to ICE detention centres in Louisiana in response to their pro-Palestinian activism. Khalil and Öztürk are just two examples of many students of colour that have been arrested at home or at their place of education, supposedly safe spaces where private information such as their location should be protected. Whilst the federal officers arresting Öztürk were granted their right to anonymity, she was tracked down and cornered outside her home – a shocking violation of privacy.
In February, the Trump administration said it had begun deporting undocumented migrants to Guantánamo Bay, only to return them to the US weeks later to send them to “another immigration facility in Louisiana”. With the state holding over 7,000 detained immigrants across nine facilities as of the 28th of April 2025, and all operated by private companies in remote areas, Louisiana appears on track to become a Guantánamo Bay on US soil. The state’s detention centres already have an extensive history of human rights abuses, poor medical care and due process violations. In the same America where the Supreme Court ruled in favour of an “exemption from federal law” for private companies to “exercise asserted religious beliefs”, which resulted in around 14,000 female employees uninsured for contraceptive care, it is perhaps unsurprising that the current administration can turn the silent disappearance of immigrants and foreign activists to private profit. Trump’s move to freeze $2 billion in grants to Harvard University after they refused to comply with his demands, and recent threats to halt the university’s intake of international students, continue to place educated young migrants at the centre of the administration’s attack on free speech.
With the global far-right on the rise and following in America’s footsteps, Trump’s techniques of repression might end up exported. Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, recently won a significant number of seats in local elections and even managed to displace some Labour constituencies, demonstrating an increase in populist right-wing views in the UK. When addressing his supporters at a rally in North-West Essex, Farage went so far as to say "I hope and believe that many things that will happen in America will serve as an inspiration to us" in response to Trump’s electoral success. The Trump administration could be taking inspiration from the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his displacement of Palestinians to the south - a potential blueprint for Trump’s detention of migrants in southern states such as Louisiana. In an article for The Guardian, technology professor John Naughton writes:
At international academic conferences recently, some American participants are travelling with ‘burner’ phones or have minimalist laptops running browsers and not much else. In other words, they are equipped with the same kind of kit that security-conscious people used to bring 15 years ago when travelling to China.
The Trump administration’s privacy violations during the arrest of university students Rümeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil have led to academics desperately trying to preserve their privacy, resorting to the use of burner phones in an attempt to reassert control over their personal data. In an America where private companies are protected whilst activists’ locations are exposed, privacy is no longer a right, but a privilege, and one least likely to be extended to residents of marginalised status, like migrants.