As a U.S. citizen, I am concerned about my safety. I was born in Flushing in New York City to a refugee father, whose family fled China because my grandfather, my YeYe, was the vice president of the Bank of China and would have been re-educated and possibly killed if he had stayed. My mother is also not native to the U.S.: She entered with a Jamaican passport because her parents had moved from Hong Kong to Kingston in search of a better life.
You could call my GungGung and PoPo “Chinese peasants,” though the more accurate description would be hard-working immigrants who get the job done and sacrifice for their children, as many immigrant and refugee parents do.
Both my parents became naturalized citizens — I recall my mother studying for her citizenship test at our kitchen table when I was 8 years old. She did not miss an election once she became a citizen, and neither have I.
Yet despite our civic engagement, nothing has prepared me or my family for the attacks on immigrants, refugees, green card holders and citizens for exercising their constitutional rights — rights that apply to everyone in the United States.
I am reading and watching news reports of people being detained at the border and taken into ICE custody when they have been seen as a “threat” to U.S. interests, and I have read stories of students having their visas and permanent legal residency revoked.
I watched in horror as Tufts Ph.D. student Rumeysa Ozturk was forcibly taken in the streets of Somerville, Mass., by masked ICE officials without due process, based on a charge that she is a Hamas sympathizer — all because she co-wrote an opinion piece for the Tufts student newspaper naming what is happening in Gaza as genocide. She exercised both academic freedom and freedom of speech, and she has now been disappeared into a prison.
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1:30 AM MDT on May 6, 20253:19 PM MDT on May 5, 2025I received an invitation to talk to the United Nations in Geneva at a conference addressing issues of global anti-Asian racism. It is one of the highest honors I’ve received as a scholar — and it is one that I did not accept because I worry that traveling back to the U.S. may put me in danger.
I worry that even though I am a U.S. citizen and carry a blue passport, even though so far this administration is targeting non-U.S. citizens, I could be among the scholars detained and disappeared because of my teaching on critical race theory, my public writing on white supremacy, and because I am on Turning Point USA’s Professor’s Watchlist.
I cannot be certain that the protections I am supposed to have as a U.S. citizen will still apply to me if what I believe is happening, is actually happening: That the U.S. is in the throes of a fascist authoritarian coup.
I have read too much history — there is an authoritarian playbook that countless dictators, fascist leaders, and their followers have used throughout the world: stop free expression in the press and silence scholars. This has happened in China, Chile, Italy, Germany, Cambodia, Russia, and I now see these same tactics being used in the United States.
I have shared my concerns with friends, family, and colleagues, half hoping that someone would tell me that I’m being overly paranoid, dramatic and worrying over nothing. Instead, these friends, family and colleagues are urging me not to travel abroad — they worry that I will be detained at the border coming back into the country. They worry that because I’m on Turning Point USA’s Watchlist that I will be among the first wave of scholars arrested.
I’m worried too — for myself, for others on the Professor’s Watchlist, for my colleagues who work in race/racism/gender/sexuality studies, for non-U.S. citizen scholars, who can have their student visas revoked or their permanent legal residency terminated for minor infractions. And I am worried that if we do not speak out now — then very soon the silence will be deafening, because it will be the kind of silence that happens when we lack the moral and ethical courage to say the things we know to be true.
So let me end with a very specific plea: Will you speak out now? When this federal administration starts to come after people like me — U.S. citizens and researchers who are simply trying to do their jobs — what will you say? If I am disappeared into the federal government system for not adhering to the ideology that they believe is “American” will you speak out?
Jennifer Ho directs the Center for Humanities & the Arts at the University of Colorado in Boulder where she also holds an appointment as a Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies.
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