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— , April 10

If the above sentence doesn’t send an Orwellian shiver down your spine, we would politely suggest you read it again and think through the implications: Foreign student-visa holders — here legally, engaged in the legitimate and constructive business of accessing (and paying for) higher education, accused of no crimes — are being warned to keep their papers on them and keep their opinions to themselves. Or else.

The “or elseâ€� isn’t hypothetical, and it isn’t just happening at far-flung universities like Columbia and Tufts. Dozens of foreign-born ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½-area college students, here legally on student visas, have recently had their visas revoked or their immigration records terminated as part of the Trump administration’s malicious campaign against free speech for even legal immigrants.

Where is the outrage from ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½-area congressional representatives as certain of their constituents are being targeted with what can only be characterized as a psychological terror campaign by America’s president? If any residents, even foreign visitors here legally, can be cowed by the federal government into self-censorship in order to avoid an official daylight abduction, how safe is everyone else?

As the Post-Dispatch’s Monica Obradovic reported Tuesday, 18 students at Webster University in Webster Groves have seen their legal residence status threatened or rescinded in recent weeks, joining at least nine SIU-Edwardsville students and scattered others at ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ University, Washington University and Lindenwood University.

They are among hundreds of immigrant students around the country who are being detained or deported by federal immigration officials — in at least one case, at Tufts University, literally snatched off a sidewalk by in broad daylight as shocked bystanders took cellphone videos.

The administration’s vague claims in that and other cases that students had engaged in support of Hamas or other anti-Israel terrorists is, as usual with this president, devoid of due-process niceties. When information about the impetus for these cases is made public at all, it has generally come down to expressions of support for Palestine through protests, social media posts or even opinions published in newspapers.

The Tufts graduate student, Turkish national Rumeysa Ozturk, for example, was apparently targeted because she co-signed an op-ed in the student newspaper that doesn’t once use the word “Hamas. � It does criticize Israel’s conduct in Gaza, a perfectly reasonable position shared by a great many natural-born Americans today. Whether you agree with that sentiment isn’t the point; policy criticism that doesn’t call for violence is protected speech in America — and not just for those born here.

This cannot be stated strongly enough: This putrid campaign by the administration isn’t ultimately just about immigration — it’s about free speech.

Like it or not, foreign-born legal U.S. residents are covered by the same First Amendment that (for the moment, at least) protects U.S.-born citizens. President Donald Trump has repeatedly demonstrated his contempt for that principle even as it relates to American media organizations, law firms and others. Just because he can carry out his darkest anti-speech impulses when it comes to immigrants doesn’t make it a valid use of power.

The self-destructiveness of this campaign is astonishing. It was Trump himself, opening his 2016 presidential bid, who infamously declared that foreign countries are sending America immigrants who are “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists� — then he added, in a brief nod to moderation: “And some, I assume, are good people.�

Students who come to the U.S. are by definition the best of those “good people.� They follow immigration rules to get here, they pass academic muster with the universities they attend. And crucially, they tend to pay full tuition, without the scholarships and various breaks for which most American-born students can qualify.

If it’s not the most morally repugnant aspect of this horrific campaign by the administration, it’s certainly the most ironic that the logical result of expelling and discouraging immigrant students is that tuition bills for American-born students could ultimately rise.

ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½-area members of Congress, particularly the majority of them who hail from Trump’s party, have been mostly silent about this attack on legal immigration (the kind even conservatives are supposed to like) and this blatant undermining of free speech (a right Republicans in particular have claimed to cherish these days).

America has long espoused noble principles when it comes to welcoming the vibrancy of other cultures into our own. Keep your papers handy and shut your mouth isn’t among those principles. Tell your congressional representatives this isn’t who we are.

House and Senate offices for individual members can be reached through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121.