People who fled authoritarian regimes say Trump’s tactics remind them of home

Last year, David Koranyi attended his mother’s 70th birthday party back home in Hungary, but the indirect route he took highlights the autocratic rule that grips his homeland. Instead of flying straight to Hungary, Koranyi flew to neighboring Austria and then turned off his phone and drove across the border where there was no passport control and he knew he could slip in undetected.

Koranyi runs an organization called Action for Democracy that has mobilized Hungarians overseas to vote back home, where political scientists say Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has tilted the electoral landscape toward his ruling party. The government says Koranyi threatens Hungary’s sovereignty; pro-government media routinely call him an “enemy of the state.”

“Friends and even embassies in Hungary … told me that maybe it’s better if I don’t come back to Hungary anytime soon,” says Koranyi, who was concerned Orbán’s government might try to detain him.

Threats like this are one reason Koranyi came to America and became a citizen in 2022. So, he’s been struck to see U.S. government agents stopping and aggressively questioning people — including citizens, tourists and green-card holders — returning to America.

They include Michigan lawyer Amir Makled, who was stopped at Detroit Metro Airport in early April as he returned from a family vacation. Makled, who said agents asked to search his phone, thinks he was targeted because he represents a pro-Palestinian protester at the University of Michigan.

“I’m not going to be a dictator”

“I never in a million years would have imagined that atmosphere of fear and that random searches at border crossings and looking into people’s phones … is something that I would live through in my life in the United States,” says Koranyi, who lives in New York.

Countless people have left authoritarian countries for the promise of freedom and safety in the United States. NPR reached out to Koranyi and a dozen others to get their impressions of the Trump administration’s first several months in power. Most — but not all — said some of the administration’s tactics reminded them of those used by the regimes they fled.

In fact, a survey in February found that hundreds of U.S.-based scholars think the United States is moving swiftly from a liberal democracy toward some form of authoritarianism.

“This is an elected government, obviously, but it is behaving as an authoritarian one, ” says Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University and co-author of How Democracies Die. “It is engaging in a rapid and systematic weaponization of the machinery of government and its deployment to punish rivals, to protect allies and to bully elements of the media.”

Some immigrants say Trump is the victim

Last fall, President Trump insisted he would not be an autocrat beyond Inauguration Day, when he said he would all but lock down the southern border and green-light drilling for energy.

“After that I’m not going to be a dictator,” Trump pledged to applause at a Fox News town hall during the campaign.

Some U.S. immigrants from authoritarian countries say Trump has kept his word. Lily Tang Williams, who is running for Congress for a third time in New Hampshire as a Republican, says it wasn’t Trump but former President Joe Biden, who most reminded her of the authoritarian leaders back in her homeland, China.

“Who censored us during the COVID times [and] put us in Facebook jail?” Tang Williams said in an interview with NPR. “It was not Trump. Trump himself was censored.”

Tang Williams says she blames the Biden administration for putting pressure on Facebook and Twitter to crack down on certain posts, including a meme she said she posted about mask mandates.

The Biden administration has said it was encouraging responsible action to protect public health.

If the Trump administration’s tactics have unsettled immigrants such as Koranyi, they’ve instilled fear in others, such as Fulya Pinar, a professor at Middlebury College in Vermont.

Similar authoritarian tactics by Turkey’s Erdogan

Pinar grew up in Turkey and says she watched Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country’s autocratic president, attack scholars and consolidate power over the news media. She says she moved to the U.S. in 2016 to study for her Ph.D. and to have intellectual freedom.

“It was about survival as an academic,” Pinar recalls, “to be able to continue thinking, teaching, writing without fear.”

Since taking office, Trump has withheld or threatened to withhold billions of dollars in federal contracts and research grants from universities, including Harvard, saying they haven’t done enough to fight antisemitism. In this atmosphere, Pinar worries some students could report her. She’s teaching Anthropologies of the Middle East this semester and doing so differently than in the past.

In her lectures, for instance, Pinar used to cite death tolls for conflicts such as the war in Gaza. Now, she directs students to readings where they can find answers on their own. It’s a way to insulate herself from charges of bias.

Fear in college classrooms

“I’m trying to be more careful,” says Pinar, who is untenured. “At the end of the semester, students usually provide feedback about professors, and then your promotion depends on that.”

Pinar’s worries are representative, according to the Middle East Scholar Barometer, which tracks the opinions of scholars who teach about the region. A survey in February found 57% of professors in the U.S. felt more pressure under the Trump administration to self-censor when discussing Israeli-Palestinian issues.

Having left Turkey’s autocracy for America’s freedom, Pinar says she never saw a period like this coming.

“I feel quite fragile because I feel like I can’t work freely here,” Pinar continues. “It just feels like I’m stuck.”

In addition to taking on universities, the Trump administration has also targeted news organizations that cover the president critically. The Federal Communications Commission is investigating broadcast news networks — including ABC, CBS and NBC — over allegations that they have favored Democrats. Trump has also attacked public broadcasters. In a social media post, he called NPR and PBS “radical left monsters” that hurt the country.

Threatening to strip licenses from TV news broadcasters 

Journalist Maria Ressa says Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines’ autocratic former president, used similar tactics. In 2020, Duterte’s government refused to renew the license of the country’s largest broadcaster and shut it down.

Duterte left office in 2022 and is now awaiting trial in The Hague on charges of crimes against humanity for allegedly allowing tens of thousands of extrajudicial killings during his war on the country’s drug trade. But Ressa says the damage he did to the news media endures.

“That network, even after the end of Duterte’s reign, never got its license … back,” says Ressa, who once ran the broadcaster herself. “What is damaged in this time period, what is destroyed, stays destroyed.”

Ressa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for standing up to Duterte’s attacks on her and her news site, Rappler. At one point, she faced the possibility of more than a century in prison on tax evasion and cyber-libel charges that human rights groups say were politically motivated. Ressa is spending this semester teaching at Columbia University. A dual citizen, she has a message for people here.

“Americans are slow to respond, but I know what fear does,” she says. “Don’t let fear paralyze you because you are at your strongest now, and every day you do not act and hold the line on your rights, you get weaker.“