Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts student whom ICE disappeared from the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts, in March, spent 45 days as a political prisoner of the United States of America.
The charges against her: coauthoring an opinion piece in her student newspaper.
The opinion she expressed is at once beside the point yet integral to the Trump administration’s campaign of terror against campus advocates, international students, and scholars the nation over: She took a stance for Palestinian lives and an end to the war in Gaza. Not falling in line with the government’s view on the topic became the raison d’être for her imprisonment.
“That literally is the case” against Öztürk, marveled US District Judge William K. Sessions in Vermont on May 9. He almost couldn’t believe the government had nothing else on her.
The 30-year-old PhD scholar, who’s in the home stretch of her doctoral program and has had to give up so much to face her accusers, wasn’t in the courtroom that day. She was more than 1,600 miles away, appearing virtually from a detention center in Louisiana. Her lawyers filed what is known as a petition for a writ of habeas corpus—precisely the legal mechanism, and historic Great Writ, that Stephen Miller has floated should be suspended to allow Donald Trump to imprison and deport more people, faster, and without judicial oversight. The same writ that migrants unlawfully disappeared to an El Salvador prison are hoping will bring them back. And which Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, doesn’t quite know how to define.
The proceedings for Öztürk, which I attended virtually, didn’t feel like a court of law, or even like an adversarial process. Surreal doesn’t quite capture it. On paper, this was a bail hearing—an opportunity for Öztürk and her legal team to make the case for her freedom. They did just that: They presented witnesses who testified to her character and academic pursuits, how she poses no threats to public safety, and about her medical condition. The government presented no witnesses; in court or otherwise, the administration has failed to make public a State Department memorandum that reportedly contradicts the official rationale for wishing to deport Öztürk—that she’s a Hamas supporter that poses a threat to US foreign policy.
In an orange jumpsuit and a hijab like the one she had on when her abduction went viral, Öztürk testified on her own behalf. She spoke softly but firmly about her deplorable conditions of confinement, and her history with asthma, which has gotten worse while imprisoned. She had both palms held to her heart, as if pleading, and later held them together, as if praying. You could see a light in her eyes as she spoke about her doctoral research—which she has described in court filings as studying “how young people use media in pro-social ways…such as helping their friends, supporting their peers during difficult times, exploring their creativity, bringing positive change, and expressing care for others and their communities.”
This is whom the Trump administration has declared an enemy of the state. Watching Öztürk describe her life’s work—that is, everything she lost—is what broke me; I texted a fellow legal journalist who was also covering the hearing, as if needing to vent: “I’m losing it with this hearing,” I told him. Things took a turn toward the absurd when Öztürk suffered an asthma episode during the hearing—maddeningly, just as a respiratory expert was testifying to how incarceration conditions can exacerbate a patient’s asthmatic condition.
This was simply too much. The judge couldn’t bear it either. After all the witnesses testified, he ordered Öztürk’s immediate release. Her detention imposes a “continued infringement” of her constitutional rights, he said from the bench.
Judge Sessions made another key finding—one that anyone who cares about the First Amendment should heed.
“Her continued detention,” he said, “potentially chills the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens. Any one of them may now avoid exercising their First Amendment rights for fear of being whisked away to a detention center from their home.”
I don’t normally break the fourth wall when writing about cases, but nothing is normal about this political persecution. Back in March, before Öztürk’s disappearance but after ICE forcibly arrested and transported Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil to Louisiana, under eerily similar circumstances, I began to sense a pattern.
So I wrote about it here in Vanity Fair, which has a long history of covering power, the politics of power, and abuses of power. I won’t bore you with what came after, but the short version is that the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which has been raising alarm about many of these abuses, asked if I’d be interested in hosting a new show, The Bully’s Pulpit: Trump v. The First Amendment. They needed a legal journalist who is conversant about these issues. I said yes.
The reason is self-evident: As I wrote two months ago, as goes Mahmoud Khalil or Rümeysa Öztürk, so go the rest of us. If the government can imprison them over their views—or for writing about issues in the national interest, as many journalists do—it can imprison anyone. It can imprison me. In this political environment, hosting a podcast about the First Amendment can become its own form of self-preservation. To uphold the very speech and press freedoms the amendment protects.
All of these freedoms are under siege right now. And the harms are ongoing. As of this writing, Khalil is still imprisoned, and over loud boos, acting Columbia president Claire Shipman mentioned his absence at graduation on Wednesday. Khalil’s lawyers continue to fight for his freedom in a courtroom in New Jersey—bringing to the judge’s attention how much the legal landscape has shifted since his high-profile arrest in March.
And shifted it has: Dr. Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown scholar and Indian national similarly arrested outside his home in March over his views on the war in Gaza—where his US citizen wife is from—was just released last week from an ICE detention center in Texas. Ruling from the bench, the judge who ordered his release echoed the judge in Özturk’s case: “The First Amendment extends to noncitizens, as it makes no distinction between citizens and noncitizens.”
Little by little, other judges are reaching the same conclusion, and they’re building a public record—and case law—that’s becoming harder to contest. Mohsen Mahdawi, the prominent Palestinian student advocate that ICE arrested at his naturalization interview in Vermont in April, has made “substantial First Amendment claims” that he was imprisoned over his campus advocacy, a federal appeals court ruled earlier this month. The judge who ordered Mahdawi’s release went further—comparing the “extraordinary setting” of his imprisonment to the first and second Red Scares, during which leftist dissenters, many of them noncitizens, were put on blacklists, rounded up, and deported on the basis of their political views.
Even if Mahdawi “were a firebrand,” and not the peaceful activist his supporters embrace, his views would still be protected by the First Amendment, Judge Geoffrey Crawford concluded. “This is not the first time that the nation has seen chilling action by the government intended to shut down debate,” he added. (Thanks to the judge, Mahdawi was able to travel to New York and graduate from Columbia this week.)
In the case of Mohammed Hoque, a Bangladeshi student whom ICE arrested over his social media posts, the administration offered shifting explanations for its actions against him. “Petitioner’s arrest aligns with the publicly stated executive policy of targeting social media users who express support for Palestinian human rights and criticize violence in Gaza, as Petitioner had done,” wrote the judge who ordered the student’s release. “Without rebuttal evidence, the record supports a finding that Petitioner’s speech…brought him to the Government’s attention for enforcement.”
As significant as these wins are for free expression, these cases are far from over. To date, the government remains committed to deporting people who express views the administration disfavors—what Khalil’s lawyers call “a broader policy of weaponizing immigration law to suppress protected pro-Palestine speech.” That policy, which The New York Times reported could be linked to the Heritage Foundation, is still in place. In other words, these students may be winning back their freedom, but the Trump administration continues to latch on a little-used law, dating back to the McCarthy era, that allows for the deportation of anyone who the Secretary of State determines poses “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is personally signing off on many of these cases, with no apparent regard to whether people are on student visas or legal permanent residents, has shown no signs of letting up.
“At some point I hope we run out because we’ve gotten rid of all of them,” Rubio said days after Öztürk’s arrest. “But we’re looking every day for these lunatics that are tearing things up.”
What the Trump administration is doing to student advocates, as unconstitutional as it is, is far from the only attack on free expression we’ve seen in the past four months. If nothing else, the attacks have only gotten worse.
The Associated Press, which for decades has been a member of the independent White House press pool, remains restricted from the Oval Office and other presidential spaces—in retaliation for its refusal to fall in line with Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. Last month, a federal judge in Washington, DC, recognized this was viewpoint discrimination that has had a direct impact on its journalism and “poisoned the AP’s business model.” But rather than restoring access to the wire service, as the judge ordered, the White House eliminated the regular slot previously reserved for the three permanent wire services, Reuters and Bloomberg News included. Last week, Trump excluded them from Air Force One during his trip to the Middle East—the first time that has happened in modern history.
(The federal appeals court in Washington, inexplicably, has yet to rule on an emergency request from the Trump administration to keep the AP on a tight leash. The end result may yet depend on the two Trump appointees who heard that request a month ago.)
Meanwhile, funding cuts and threats directed at institutions that create and disseminate news, knowledge, culture, and research are legion. The administration’s escalating legal confrontation with Harvard, which has mounted a sweeping First Amendment challenge to an ever-expanding list of funding cuts and other retaliatory demands, remains a case to watch. Since the university announced it won’t take the government’s “draconian” demands lying down, an alphabet soup of federal agencies have ratcheted up the pressure. Among them is the Justice Department, which last week accused the Ivy League of—and demanded reams of documents over—supposedly defrauding the government over its admissions policies.
“Under whatever name, the Government has ceased the flow of funds to Harvard as part of its pressure campaign to force Harvard to submit to the Government’s control over its academic programs,” lawyers for the university wrote in an amended lawsuit filed last week. “That, in itself, violates Harvard’s constitutional rights.” On Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security announced a breathtaking escalation of its war against Harvard: revoking its ability to enroll international students.
Public media has taken a hit too. Top of the list are NPR and PBS, both of which Trump targeted earlier this month with an executive order that purported to direct the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to “cease federal funding” for their operations. The corporation already took the president to court over his attempt to fire members of its board, and the board recently amended its bylaws to explicitly prevent “the president of the United States” from interfering with its operations. NPR, for its part, has denounced the executive order as “an affront to the First Amendment rights” of the station and its affiliates scattered across the nation. And that’s on top of questionable steps Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, which by law must act “in the public interest,” has taken to investigate the public broadcasters and media organizations the president has seen fit to punish.
Controlling the message by silencing the messengers—or worse—is a hallmark of authoritarianism. Few journalists know this as well as those who work for the US Agency for Global Media, Voice of America, and related networks chartered or supported by Congress to promote free speech values around the world. Besmirched as “anti-Trump” by the president himself, and singled out by Project 2025 and others in Trumpworld, all of these entities are enmeshed in a high-pitched legal battle in Washington, where a judge last month prevented the Trump administration from dismantling their operations—only to face a setback before the same panel of Trump-appointed judges considering the AP’s case. In an anguished dissent, Judge Nina Pillard, an Obama appointee, noted that Voice of America journalists, many of whom face threats in their home countries if forced to return there, “have been unable to exercise their First Amendment rights to free speech and free press.” She added that the “loss of First Amendment freedoms, for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury.”
The bleeding there continues. And thanks to news personality turned MAGA soldier Kari Lake, the remaining shell may yet turn into a right-wing, pro-Trump mouthpiece. That’s the end game in this new dawn for the First Amendment: bend people and institutions to get with the program, toe the line, be pro-Trump, and espouse the views only he and his circle deem acceptable. This is the very kind of government-coerced speech, or “preferred narrative,” that Trump claimed he wanted to get rid of on his first day in office.
In this new reality, pro-Palestininan speech must be crushed. Law firms representing clients or causes the president doesn’t like must be run out of Washington. Anyone who values diversity, equity, and inclusion, who believes that Black and trans lives matter, or who cares about climate change must lose research funding, government contracts, or even access to critical information belonging to all of us. Even history must be rewritten to fit the president’s worldview. You either get with the Trump program or get out—and be deported, defunded, deplatformed, dismantled, or diminished in other ways. Every one of these actions run headlong into the First Amendment; judges and lawsuits alone won’t stop them. All of civic society must take courage, embrace a politics of solidarity, and resist them.
Recounting a conversation she had with a young Turkish journalist, Margaret Sullivan noted this week how this reporter once viewed the United States “as a beacon of press freedom”—and hoped that Turkey would one day be more like us. But the reporter, Sullivan wrote, had a change of heart: “I had hoped that we would someday become like a little United States. But now it seems like America is becoming a big version of Turkey.”
Turkey, as it happens, is where Rümeysa Öztürk is from.
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