The US Is Becoming Russia
The United States once stood as a proud beacon of freedom and opportunity. Now, news stories coming out of the US give me déjà vu of the authoritarian country from which I left seven years ago: Russia. When I read how the American immigration service deported, without due process, Andry José Hernández Romero, a 31-year-old gay makeup artist and legal resident who came to the US as an asylum seeker fleeing homophobic and political persecution in Venezuela, it gave me post-Soviet flashbacks. And it’s become part of a troubling pattern in 2025. 238 Venezuelans were deported, also without due process, including dozens with active asylum cases. A Canadian actress who came to the US on a work visa was de-facto kidnapped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). A father of two in Maryland with protected legal status was mistakenly deported to a brutal prison in El Salvador. What’s more, President Trump has vowed to end birthright citizenship, refused to return people deported by mistake, and raised the prospect of shipping American citizens to El Salvador’s “mega-prison.”
It all reminds me of the Russian attacks on Chechen civilians, who were sent to concentration camps, or Thailand's forced return of Uyghurs to China to face certain prosecution or even death from the Chinese Communist Party. The US now indiscriminately violates the human rights of a particular group of people — anyone who doesn’t look like what the new administration thinks of as an American.
Romero was “accused” by ICE of being a member of a transnational criminal gang, Tren de Aragua, largely because he is Venezuelan and has tattoos. Andrés Antillano, a criminology professor at the Central University of Venezuela who has spent years studying Tren de Aragua, told The New Yorker: “This is the first time I’ve ever encountered any reference to the significance of tattoos [for Tren de Aragua].”
Ronna Rísquez, a Venezuelan journalist whose book on Tren de Aragua is considered definitive, also told the magazine, “The truth is that a tattoo identifying Tren de Aragua does not exist.”
As one would imagine, Tren de Aragua is not an LGBT-friendly organisation. Their hyper-masculine, prison-born culture does not tolerate gay or bi people, and would not accept someone like Andry Romero. It’s also unclear what use a criminal syndicate would have for a makeup artist. This information is not hard to find — the Trump administration simply seems uninterested in the facts.
I once found myself in a situation somewhat similar to Romero. Four years ago, the Russian politician Yevgeny Fedorov threatened a criminal case against me, accusing me, of all things, of recruiting women to the Islamic State by using feminist ideas. In bringing up such an absurd accusation, he also called me a “Ukrainian lesbian” (I’m neither a lesbian nor fully Ukrainian by blood) and blamed me for supporting both “Islamic terrorism” and “gay propaganda” which would make me perhaps the world’s first LGBT activist Jihadi.
Yevgeny Fedorov is a Russian legislator in the ruling United Russia party and the leader of the far-right National Liberation Movement, which is famous for repeatedly calling for nuclear attacks on the United States, as well as anti-scientific and anti-American conspiracy theories. So, of course, he didn’t care that it is literally impossible to be an ISIS supporter and be openly queer. The accusation arose from an article I wrote about the War on Terror. The piece, which included my own story as well as interviews with Muslim women in Russia and the UK, pointed out that Islam, just like with Christianity and Judaism, is not synonymous with “terrorism.” The article, combined with the fact that I was an LGBT activist, gave the corrupt authorities all the pretext they needed.
I lost almost all of my Russian LGBT allies after this fake accusation of terrorism. Despite years of collaboration and friendship, most of them were silent because they didn't want to look connected to someone who was blamed for “extremism”, which, in Russia, includes LGBT activism by law.
At the time, these allegations seemed quite bizarre to my friends in America. Now the US is recreating this Russian playbook. It is extremely clear that the Donald Trump administration used the Tren de Aragua gang to invoke the Alien Enemies Act — a law passed in 1798 that had previously been used just three times in American history, all during wartime. Now it’s invoked to round up people of South American origin and deport them without trial to a mega-prison in El Salvador or to Guantanamo Bay, where detainees and inmates are subjected to violence and humiliation. Andry Romero was sent to the prison without due process, without a removal order, and unbeknownst to his lawyer and to the judge who was awaiting the hearing on his case. This doesn’t just arguably violate the Sixth Amendment of the US Constitution, it’s also extremely cruel and inhumane — El Salvador’s prisons are known for their brutality, especially toward LGBT inmates.
The question for all Americans is, if ICE agents can make a seemingly harmless gay makeup artist disappear without any trails, what’s to stop the government from snatching you? Maybe you’re not South American, but these are deportations without any checks, verification, or proper procedure. If my autistic, bi, part-Roma wife were living in the US right now, she may be stopped and deported as well, especially because she has a tattoo with the logo of a Portuguese metal band. That may sound far-fetched, but there have been cases of people taken by ICE for wearing an autism Awareness ribbon, and Andry Romero was taken for a tattoo of a crown with the “Mom” and “Dad” in English — not a gang symbol.
You may be an American citizen, but that doesn’t matter. Once the government throws the Constitution away — ICE agents can claim that you are a foreign criminal, and you’ll have no opportunity to prove otherwise. I know firsthand where these kinds of power abuses can lead to. They will grow and spread to more categories of people until the state has absolute power and no one is safe. Unchecked, these sorts of policies will eventually spell the end of the American way of life. As Martin Niemöller’s famous poem warns, “First they come” for one group, and next they come for another until there’s no one left to persecute but you. This is why human rights matter. The time to stand up for them is now.
Published Apr 8, 2025
