Kaveh Akbar drops a searingly emotional piece for The Nation in reaction to the abduction of Rumeysa Ozturk:

This is, more than anything, a plea for principled leftists to rise en masse and not just decry but disrupt a nation helmed by gleeful genocideers. I’m writing frantically, aware my prose is ugly, overearnest, unvetted against worst-faith readers. It’s graceless, unlovely. So am I.

Tonight I want to be understood, not appreciated.

I could quote the piece at length, but to do so would be a disservice to both Akbar and to you.

It’s critical that I share this plea, however:

I want to tell you powerlessness is an alibi. Hopelessness too. I want to ask, what specifically are you going to do? Tomorrow, the next day? What’s your “I am Spartacus” move to protect the more vulnerable, the targeted, the invisibled, the next-on-the-list?

I want to say, it’s your turn now, help. This is us asking you while we still can.

I’ve taken one tiny step: I added the phone number for the San Francisco Immigrant Rapid Response Hotline (415-200-1548) to my contacts, so I’m prepared to act if I see someone being confronted by ICE.

Find the equivalent service in your area and add the number to your phone.

I finally brought myself to watch the video of ICE’s abduction of Tufts PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk. It’s even more disturbing than I expected after reading the story because, watching, it looks exactly like a random kidnapping off the streets—plainclothes men and women, with masks, approaching a woman and coercing her into an SUV. It was simply done quietly, with badges and handcuffs, instead of loudly, with guns and chloroform-soaked handkerchiefs.

Opportunistic criminals with two-bit tin badges can now confidently disappear someone off the street, and we’ll simply assume they’re with ICE. 

That ambushing people on the street or at home is tolerated, even applauded by a fraction of Americans—and defended by our government officials, no less—is profoundly alarming. That it’s done in such a casual manner is equally disturbing.

At what point does ICE become indistinguishable from the Gestapo?