At around 5:15 pm on Tuesday, a man in a black hoodie stopped Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk on the street in Somerville, Massachusetts. She tried to walk by, but he grabbed her. She screamed, and it seemed like help was arriving.
But the masked newcomers were actually there to help her assailant. They took off Ozturk’s backpack and seized her cellphone. The hooded man put her in handcuffs. “We’re the police,” they told her.
“You don’t look like it,” an apparent bystander replied. “Why are you hiding your faces?”
Ozturk, a Turkish national on a student visa, is currently being held in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center in Louisiana — despite a court order that she must remain in Massachusetts. The State Department has canceled Ozturk’s visa; ICE is preparing her deportation.
The Trump administration claims she has engaged in “pro-Hamas” activity, but they have provided no evidence of material support for Palestinian militants (or any other terrorist group). The closest thing anyone has found is a 2024 op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper, in which Ozturk and her co-authors criticize Israel’s war in Gaza but do not express anything that even approximates support for Hamas.
This troubling theory — that Ozturk was punished purely for her political speech — received more support during a Thursday afternoon press conference, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that his agency revoked Ozturk’s visa because she was part of a pro-Palestinian movement that caused “a ruckus” on campus.
“We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses,” he said, while providing no evidence that Ozturk had done anything more disruptive than penning an op-ed. He also suggested he had revoked the visas of “more than 300” students like her on similar grounds.
This is a clarifying moment for American democracy. Unmarked and unidentified law enforcement abducting a lawful migrant, seemingly in retaliation for First Amendment-protected speech, is the sort of attack on civil liberties that we would not hesitate to label as authoritarian in another country.
And it is only one example among many.
The targeting of at least seven other pro-Palestinian students, the rendering of hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to a Salvadoran prison camp, and the extended detention and physical abuse of lawful migran
