David French: MAGA Is Making America Less Free

**Tim Miller** (0:13)
Hello, and welcome to The Bulwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome back to the show, Opinion Commons for the New York Times, co-host of the legal podcast, Advisory Opinions, former JAG officer.
It is David French. Welcome back, David.

**David French** (0:25)
Tim, great to see you.

**Tim Miller** (0:27)
Good to see you too, man. We'll have much to discuss, including ending with your class conversation about just war theory and LSU football. So we'll get to that. I have minor good news for listeners and appreciation for people that were calling Katie Britt and others' office. The Venezuelan family had mentioned a couple of weeks ago now, Edgar Riani and Freddys did finally get out of the Dilley Detention Center and they are back in Venezuela.
I mean, probably the best news would have been if they were able to stay in America, but that's neither here nor there. At least, they're no longer in a detention center. I appreciate the audience that engaged on that. Less good news on some of the other stuff related to the detentions. I wanted to start there. You wrote a Times column this week talking about now, about a year old, the Rameza Ostark story. There's a legal ruling about that, that reflected back on that story and talked about just the perniciousness of this policy by the administration. So why don't you just cook on that?

**David French** (1:23)
Sure, sure, sure. So let's go back to March 2025, March of last year. And there was this footage that was really, when you knew it in context, was really shocking. It's this young Muslim woman. She's bundled up for the winter and it's cold weather. And some plainclothes officers come up to her. One of them puts his hands on her. She screams. Next thing you know, there are several other plainclothes officers. They kind of gather around her, lead her away, Shackler lead her away.
And if that was a video of an arrest for say, a violent crime, you know, a murderer, armed robber, something like that, it would not be a shocking video. It'd actually be kind of a benign arrest. I mean, she wasn't thrown to the ground or anything like that.
But then you heard why she was arrested. She was arrested and detained for deportation because she was a co-author of Tim, what is really a pretty milk toast op-ed? Yeah. I mean, it was anti-Israel, no question about it. I was calling for a Tufts University where she was a graduate student to boycott Israel, wanted the school to call what was happening in Gaza genocide, like very standard rhetoric, like very standard rhetoric.

**Tim Miller** (2:36)
Yeah.

**David French** (2:36)
She was one of four authors, and immediately the news comes out that she was being deported under this relatively obscure legal provisions. They give the Secretary of State essentially total discretion to deport a visa holder when the Secretary of State, in total discretion, decides that they're a serious threat to the foreign policy of the United States. When I first heard this, I thought that can't be right, like even in the Trump administration.

**Tim Miller** (3:05)
Yeah, right.

**David French** (3:05)
Like even in the Trump administration.

**Tim Miller** (3:06)
She's got to be texting ISIS or something.

**David French** (3:08)
Yeah, she's texting ISIS, she's shoplifted, like something else is going on. But no, as the court proceedings unfolded and there was a bail hearing, after she'd been detained for weeks, Tim, for weeks, there was a bail hearing, and the judge in the hearing was like, no, this is, she was detained for co-authoring. Again, this was not an op-ed calling for the violent overthrow of the United States of America. It was an op-ed engaging in bog standard, pro-Palestinian rhetoric. Like the most standard pro-Palestinian rhetoric. It wasn't even written in an inflammatory way. It's pretty dry, to be honest.
In fact, she had been detained for weeks for writing an op-ed.
The reason I wrote about this, this incident that occurred in 2025, is because just last week, there was a federal judge in California who struck down or issued a declaratory judgment declaring that the statutes that Rubio had used were unconstitutional, at least as applied to protected speech. In other words, the government was relying on unconstitutional statutes to deport non-citizens for their speech. I wrote about that for a couple of reasons. One is, I'm just getting all of this normie Republicans who are desperate for a normie Republican to unite behind in around 2028 A lot of them have fixed their eyes on Marco Rubio. Well, Rubio, in his little sphere of influence, has been a bit of a 10-pot dictator.