It's also pretty clear that this isn't matching the pattern of an espionage case, since they gave everyone more than a week of advance notice that something was to happen.

Who knows? The "advanced notice" (I'm assuming here you're referring to IU's decision to place him on leave, remove him from their web pages, and notify his colleagues, more than week before the raid) makes this look less like some extrajudicial ICE-type thing, not more. But nobody knows anything right now! We know he has legal representation, from the story, and competent legal representation is going to tell you to shut the absolute hell up in a situation like this, so there's not much to learn from the fact that Goodin can't raise him for a quote.

My only take here (besides the certainty that the shadowy hand of the FISA FISC court is not behind all this) is that it doesn't look like another ICE raid.

Sure, I mean, the FBI's involvement makes it not look like another department's case. I am saying that on top of that, an arrest of any kind would (normally) go differently than whatever happened to this professor. The idea that the FBI would call the employer of a suspected spy, inform them that something was going to happen, that all of his colleagues would be informed, and then after a week they'd search his home, stands out as not a full explanation.

> The idea that the FBI would call the employer of a suspected spy, inform them that something was going to happen, that all of his colleagues would be informed, and then after a week they'd search his home, stands out as not a full explanation.

I don't think anyone, least of all OP, is suggesting this is what happened.

Everything is rank speculation at this point, but if I were going to speculate I'd speculate that Wang suddenly left the country of his own volition and the employer began investigating his disappearance and stumbled on things that led to them calling in the FBI.

That's still purely speculation, but it would account for the sequence of events and the manner of investigation way better than any ideas about him being "vanished" by the US government.

> It's also pretty clear that this isn't a normal espionage case,

You don't know if its detained, you don't know if is in the territory of the USA, you don't know anything....If it's a US Citizen would be espionage because?

> we don't even know if Wang is in custody

so you're saying he vanished...?

There's an enormous semantic distinction between "Wang vanished" and "Wang was vanished".

Yes, as far as we know he vanished, but as far as we know he did so under his own will before the university even put him on leave.