Life in Trumpian America is like the Salem witch trials

It is no longer the land of the free or the brave as citizens cower in fear of persecution or arrest

- Charmain Naidoo

(Photos: iStock: Freepik)

Sitting around a table in New York with a group of women celebrating the big birthday of a friend, I was smacked in the face by what it feels like to live in a society where education, status and citizenship are no longer a guarantee of safety from arrest, imprisonment or, worst of all, deportation.

I could smell the fear coming off the women - fear of reprisal for saying anything that goes against what is considered to be "acceptable" speech; fear of being cancelled, of having work contracts summarily ended. And in one case, of having one's immigration status revoked and being sent back to a country where you have not lived.

Welcome to Trumpian America, the land of the not so free and, certainly, the not so brave. The women at that table, all academics, all lecturers in their specific field of law, all from universities dotted across this vast country, had a story to tell, all of them tinged with the undertones of bullying, all laced with huge threads of trepidation.

The immigration law lecturer described how head-shakingly perplexed she is on a daily basis, as laws that were in the statute books last week might not apply this week. She tells how impossible it is to teach, to guide her students through the shifting quicksand parameters of immigration law.

What the inalienable rights of citizens were a month ago might no longer apply. She is at sea. How do you impart knowledge when the bottom has fallen out of what is, or rather was, written down as the benchmark for that particular subject?

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is plucking people off the street every day, taking them to detention centres. People are randomly being asked to prove they are legally allowed to be in the US.

It reminds me of our own troubled history, when black South Africans had to carry a "dompas", the document that controlled black people's movement during apartheid.