Missed Translations - Sopan Deb Page 0,21

March 11, 2016. As soon as it was announced, the chatter of massive protests started making the rounds. A week earlier, Trump addressed a packed airport hangar outside New Orleans, and as he started speaking, he held up, Lion King–style, a baby he had signed in Baton Rouge at an earlier rally. Just in case your eyes glossed over that last sentence, he held up a baby he’d autographed—with an actual marker—weeks before as if he was Baby Simba in The Lion King.

This Chicago rally was supposed to be held at the UIC Pavilion on the University of Illinois at Chicago campus. As I entered the arena hours beforehand, the intensity was already palpable. Hundreds of yelling and chanting young protesters had taken over nearly the entire back half of the arena. Perhaps out of familiarity or wishful thinking, I mentally played down the reports that there would be large-scale protests. This happens at every rally. But it was another reporter standing near me who made me reconsider. Surveying the back of the room, she remarked, “Some shit is gonna go down tonight.” I chuckled uneasily, realizing, somewhere in the back of my mind, that she was probably right. This was more reality than carnival.

The night started off normally enough when three men wearing white T-shirts were ejected in an upper section of the arena. I jetted toward them with my camera to grab footage, just in case it got rowdy. Their T-shirts read MUSLIMS UNITED AGAINST TRUMP on the back, and as the crowd chanted, “U-S-A!” each man raised one fist into the air. No violence. There was an order to these things. Like clockwork. They were escorted out under an electronic scoreboard reading MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.

I remarked to a Slate reporter, “People think it’s new, but this has been going on at Trump rallies since at least November. There’ll be ten more of those tonight.” The back of my mind hadn’t reached the front of my lips.

What I didn’t realize was that hundreds of protesters had gathered outside. Cable news was running constant aerials of the crammed streets. The intensity started ramping up, both inside and outside the arena. Eventually, much to the shock of all of us, Trump canceled the rally about half an hour before it was supposed to start, setting off pandemonium unlike anything I had ever seen.

Scuffles started breaking out inside and outside, and protests were becoming violent as demonstrators clashed with police. I grabbed my camera and ran outside to gather footage for the network.

Suddenly, in a split second, I felt a tug on the back of my sweatshirt. Well, it wasn’t so much of a tug as it was an aggressive backward yank from multiple police officers.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!” I yelled.

I was slammed into the ground.

“Put your hands behind your back! Hands behind your back!”

My face was bashed into the street. My camera went flying. One of the officers put his boot to my neck and handcuffed me. I could hear nothing at this point other than the sound of the arresting officer’s police walkie-talkie blaring codes.

The police officer walked away. I lay there on the street on my stomach, in shock. The entire process took about thirty seconds; I never even saw the police officers’ faces. I just knew I was in pain and that a mistake had been made. Another officer eventually came and picked me up off the ground and escorted me to the police van. I calmly informed him that I was a member of the press and asked why I had been arrested. He (very genuinely, I think) said he didn’t know. For the next couple of hours, I was in police custody. I was able to, however—somehow, while handcuffed—reach into my pocket, grab my phone, and alert the higher-ups at the network that I had been arrested.

Word spread like wildfire that I was detained. It turned out that Fox News had run video of my arrest without realizing I was a journalist, which ended up being what saved me. You see, no one could seem to explain exactly why I had been thrown to the ground and handcuffed. I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I didn’t disobey any police officers. I was a journalist on a public street doing my thing. So I was bizarrely charged with resisting arrest. Aside from the Fox News footage, my camera continued to roll. You could clearly hear me very politely asking a Chicago police officer why I