To the editor:

A while ago a Fulbright appointment sent me, a local college professor, to teach debate in a very large Asian country. With no freedom of speech there, I was cautioned not to create practice-round topics requiring debaters to criticize any government policy. So I chose innocuous topics like “Being poor is better than being rich” and “Study abroad in the US is better than study abroad in Britain.” I didn’t mind the restriction, believing that the very act of teaching debate in such a country, helping students there think critically and see that issues had multiple sides, were significant contributions.

The following semester three of those students, bright young women, came to the U.S. for a semester at my school. Eager to get everything from the experience, they threw themselves into classwork and co-curricular activities, writing for the school paper and even joining the debate team which I coached. I watched them enjoy witnessing and engaging in debates on all manner of public policy – yes, even critical of our government. In America we can do that. While in the United States, they experienced what freedom – especially freedom of speech — was all about. They took that feeling back to their home country, and they will remember what living with freedom was like.

Today students from abroad can’t do that. Our current government is sending masked agents to snatch lawfully present students off the street, bustling them away in unmarked cars, and “disappearing” them to distant locations with no constitutional due process, no charges, no trial, not even a hearing, supposedly because they once wrote an article or engaged in a legal protest critical of some government policy. In other words, today’s overseas students are being taught that the United States has become just like the oppressive country they came from. It’s just one of the many heart-breaking changes we are witnessing from this administration. But this one struck me close to home because of the students I hosted. And now should I be afraid to walk down the street because I wrote this, critical of our government? They can “disappear” anybody.

Thomas Kuster

New Ulm