A Tufts Student Criticized Israel. Then the Trump Administration Disappeared Her

“Can I just call the police?” the woman asked.

“We’re the police,” one of the masked, plainclothes agents replied before leading her away in handcuffs.

The woman, Rumeysa Ozturk, is a Turkish-born Fulbright scholar studying in a PhD program at Tufts University in Massachusetts. She was on her way to an Iftar dinner in Somerville on Tuesday when immigration enforcement officers intercepted her on a street corner, put her into an SUV, and took her away. The 30-year-old, who has apparently not been charged with a crime, was transferred to a detention center in Louisiana, though federal Judge Indira Talwani ordered Tuesday that Ozturk must “not be moved outside the District of Massachusetts without first providing advance notice of the intended move.”

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Ozturk holds a legal F-1 visa and was arrested for engaging in “activities in support of Hamas,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement. “Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated,” the DHS said. But it did not say with any specificity what those alleged “activities” were, and Canary Mission, the pro-Israel group that targeted Ozturk for her support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, seemed to point only to an an op-ed she co-authored last year for the Tufts school newspaper as evidence of her “anti-Israel activism.”

Ozturk is one of several foreign-born university students to be targeted in recent weeks as part of Donald Trump’s crackdowns on both immigration and dissent. In another high-profile case this month, federal agents arrested legal permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University in New York, where the Palestinian-born 30-year-old once led protests against the war in Gaza. Khalil was also transported to Louisiana.

The detentions are part of a broader Trump crusade against what a senior State Department official described as “Hamasniks,” protesters they accuse of supporting the terror group behind the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. “Everyone is fair game,” the official told Axios, describing the administration’s effort to limit foreign students at colleges that have too many who are “pro-Hamas” and to revoke visa-holders who demonstrated against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war.

It is an understatement to say this is an assault on free speech. In fact, there is a word for a government that disappears people without due process: “This is authoritarianism,” Massachusetts Ed Markey wrote Wednesday, as video of Ozturk’s broad daylight arrest spread online and in the national media. “We will not let this stand.”

Thousands protested Ozturk’s detention Wednesday in Somerville, and a number of Democrats sounded alarms about the “attack on our fundamental freedoms,” as Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley put it. But the Republican majority in Washington has remained in lockstep with Trump since he took office, and it remains to be seen if the judiciary will be a meaningful constraint on him, with the administration openly arguing that federal judges don’t have the authority to check the president’s executive power. The administration has already brazenly defied a recent court order to halt and reverse deportations conducted under the auspices of the Alien Enemies Act of 1789, as well as one to pause the deportation of a Brown University professor and visa holder. It appears to have ignored another district judge’s order in Ozturk’s case, with her attorney saying ICE transferred her to Louisiana shortly after Talwani ruled she not be moved from Massachusetts without notice.

This is a perilous moment in America. Civil liberties and basic freedoms are under direct attack by a lawless administration, one that seems to consider itself unfettered by constitutional or political restraints—and has yet to be proven wrong.