So now the war comes home, as wars always do. This time it’s the dirty war that the American government is waging against immigrants, international students and the rule of law. And home is the heart of the Upper Valley.

The abduction and detention on Monday of Mohsen Mahdawi, an uprooted Palestinian from a West Bank refugee camp who set down deep roots in the Upper Valley over the past 10 years, brings home forcefully the scope of the terror the Trump administration has unleashed in a few short months.

Federal agents seized Mahdawi, 34, at an office building in northern Vermont where he had been summoned purportedly for a citizenship interview and instead spirited him away to a prison in St. Albans. Only the timely intervention of his lawyers and a federal judge prevented, for the time being at least, that stop from being a way station on the road to hell — that is, a federal detention facility in Louisiana where other international students targeted by the Trump administration are being held.

Note that these unidentified armed agents of the government went about their dirty work in plainclothes while wearing hoods, transported Mahdawi in a caravan of unmarked SUVs, and employed a ruse — the citizenship interview — to snatch him after he was targeted for deportation by informers. A permanent legal resident of the United States, his only crime that we know of is exercising the right to free speech. Nonetheless, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio asserts that Mahdawi’s activism “could undermine the Middle East peace process by reinforcing antisemitic sentiment.”

These are the hallmarks of a police state: a transparently flimsy pretext for detention, which is executed by agents who know they should be ashamed of themselves and who fear the consequences should they ever be identified and called to account.

Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts graduate student similarly swept up last month outside of Boston and now being held in Louisiana, told The Boston Globe that an immigration agent assured her at one point, “We are not monsters.”

To which the only rational reply is, monstrous is what monsters do.

Mahdawi’s many friends and supporters here and elsewhere seem mystified as to why he was caught up in the government dragnet. They know him as a spiritual man of peaceful intent who has tried sincerely to bridge the divide between Palestinians and Israelis, only to be reviled by extremists on both sides. A student of philosophy at Columbia who is scheduled to graduate this spring, Mahdawi initially participated in pro-Palestinian demonsrations there, only to pull back when the rhetoric became heated. He is reported to have many Jewish friends, a number of whom have been quoted in news stories.

We are not mystified that so unthreatening a figure has been deemed a threat. The philosopher Hannah Arendt tells us why in her exploration of “The Origins of Totalitarianism”: Key to the totalitarian secret police, she tells us, is not “the suspect” but rather “the objective enemy. The latter is defined by the policy of the government and not by his desire to overthrow it. He is never an individual whose dangerous thoughts must be provoked or whose past justifies suspicion, but a ‘carrier of tendencies’ like the carrier of a disease.” Thus does Trump speak of his political opponents as vermin and immigrants as “poisoning the blood of America.”

It is time now to connect the dots. The preliminary skirmishes in this dirty war were fought at places like Dartmouth, which called in riot police to quell a peaceful pro-Palestinian protest last spring. Those responsible for doing so helped set the stage for the abduction of Mahdawi and others like him who will suffer the consequences of intolerance for legitimate dissent, as will the whole nation.

So now the war is here and has a face. There’s no escaping it. And residents of the Upper Valley have to reckon with it. And they should prepare themselves to answer the future question, “So, mommy and daddy, what did you do in the war? Which side were you on?”