New Trump plan for mind control
Stephen
Prager for Common Dreams
The bill, introduced by Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), will come
up for a hearing on Wednesday. According to The Intercept:
Mast’s new bill claims to target a narrow set of people. One
section grants the secretary of state the power to revoke or refuse to issue
passports for people who have been convicted—or merely charged—of material
support for terrorism...
The other section sidesteps the legal process entirely. Rather, the secretary
of state would be able to deny passports to people whom they determine “has
knowingly aided, assisted, abetted, or otherwise provided material support to
an organization the Secretary has designated as a foreign terrorist
organization.”
Rubio has previously boasted of stripping the visas and green cards from several immigrants based purely on their peaceful expression of pro-Palestine views, describing them as “Hamas supporters.”
These include Columbia protest leader Mahmoud Khalil, who
was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after Rubio voided
his green card; and Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts student whose visa Rubio revoked
after she co-wrote an op-ed calling for her school to divest from Israel.
Mast—a former soldier for the Israel Defense Forces who
once stated that babies were “not innocent Palestinian
civilians”—has previously called for “kicking terrorist sympathizers out of our
country,” speaking about the Trump administration’s attempts to deport Khalil,
who was never convicted or even charged with support for a terrorist group.
Critics have argued that the bill has little reason to exist
other than to allow the Secretary of State to unilaterally strip passports from
people without them actually having been convicted of a crime.
As Kia Hamadanchy, a senior policy counsel at the American
Civil Liberties Union, noted in The Intercept, there is little
reason to restrict people convicted of terrorism or material support for
terrorism, since—if they were guilty—they’d likely be serving a long prison
sentence and incapable of traveling anyway.
“I can’t imagine that if somebody actually provided material
support for terrorism, there would be an instance where it wouldn’t be
prosecuted—it just doesn’t make sense,” he said.
Journalist Zaid Jilani noted
on X that “judges can already remove a passport over material support
for terrorism, but the difference is you get due process. This bill would
essentially make Marco Rubio judge, jury, and executioner.”
The bill does contain a clause allowing those stripped of
their passports to appeal to Rubio. But, as Hamadanchy notes, the decision is
up to the secretary alone, “who has already made this determination.” He said
that for determining who is liable to have their visa stripped, “There’s no
standard set. There’s nothing.”
As Seth Stern, the director of advocacy at the Freedom of
the Press Foundation, noted in The Intercept, the language in Mast’s bill is
strikingly similar to that found in the so-called “nonprofit killer” provision that Republicans
attempted to pass in July’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act. That provision, which
was ultimately struck from the bill, would have allowed the Treasury Secretary
to unilaterally strip nonprofit status from anything he deemed to be a
“terrorist-supporting organization.”
Stern said Mast’s bill would allow for “thought policing at
the hands of one individual.”
“Marco Rubio has claimed the power to designate people
terrorist supporters based solely on what they think and say,” he said, “even
if what they say doesn’t include a word about a terrorist organization or
terrorism.”
