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.