The disappearing of Rumeysa Ozturk is something I never thought I’d see in America
Masked federal agents in an unmarked vehicle snatched a Tufts student off the street for an op-ed she wrote in a college newspaper.
You’ve probably seen something like this before — but only in a movie, and only in a film that was seeking to capture the horrors of daily life under Joseph Stalin at the peak of his 1930s purges across the USSR, or maybe a Gestapo thriller set in Nazi Germany.
At 5:30 p.m. on a spring day on an urban residential street, a young woman in a bright white coat, hijab, and sneakers, engrossed in her mobile phone, emerges from a residence. Within seconds, a gaggle of men in black, who’ve been waiting for hours in a car nearby, surround the startled pedestrian, as the apparent leader wrestles away her phone.
The men awkwardly pull down ski masks to cover their faces as they handcuff the shrieking 30-year-old woman and remove her backpack — no doubt leaving her to wonder whether she is being arrested … or kidnapped. As a neighbor’s doorbell camera recorded the scene on video, the handcuffed woman is led by these men in street clothes into their unmarked car, as one is finally heard to explain: “We are the police.”
But this wasn’t a movie. This was America in March 2025, two months after Donald Trump returned to the White House. It’s hardly a stretch to describe the masked men who arrested Rumeysa Ozturk Tuesday night outside her home in Somerville, Mass., as secret police, because a Kafkaesque journey was just beginning for this doctoral student at Tufts University.
For the next 24 hours, friends and family, and even the lawyer for the Turkish citizen — who was in the United States legally on a student visa — were left in the dark about her whereabouts. Only late Wednesday, and after a judge ordered that Ozturk not leave Massachusetts, did the government finally acknowledge that the grad student had already been flown some 1,600 miles to a detention center in Louisiana operated by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. Ozturk has become just the latest and most egregious case in a rapidly escalating government roundup of noncitizen students and activists.
There are many, many stunning and unprecedented things happening in Trump’s America right now. But I chose to write about this one because, frankly, once you have watched the chilling video of masked government goons snatching Ozturk off the street in broad daylight, it is hard to think — let alone write — about anything else.
Other posters on social media sites like Bluesky have shared the same sense of utter shock. Even after many months of warning that a vengeful Trump 47 would attempt to govern this way, we still cannot believe it can happen here, in the United States of America. Call this fascism, but remarkably, that particular F-word has lost its sting in the sheer exhaustion of the decade since our strongman ruler descended on that golden escalator at Trump Tower. What is happening to Ozturk is state-sponsored terrorism.
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It’s hard to imagine how this story could get any worse — yet it does. At this point, you’re probably wondering what sort of heinous crime this seemingly nonthreatening millennial woman committed that drew so many ICE agents onto her case. When pressed for an explanation, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security insisted their investigations have “found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.” They said the student visa of Ozturk — a Fulbright scholar who’d earned a master’s degree at Columbia University’s Teachers College before launching her doctoral studies at Tufts — has been revoked.
But there’s nothing in the public domain — even in an entry on the website of Canary Mission, an organization that targets individual college students claiming to monitor antisemitism — indicating that Ozturk, who is Muslim, has ever voiced public support for Hamas, the perpetrators of the violent Oct. 7, 2023, attack against Israel.
All that is known is that Ozturk is one of four bylines on a March 26, 2024, op-ed in the Tufts Daily student newspaper that called on the university president to act on a student senate resolution condemning what it called “genocide” by Israeli forces who, a year later, have reportedly killed more than 50,000 people in Gaza, and to divest any Tufts funds that support Israel. The piece quotes the late author James Baldwin on the importance in education of critically examining society, criticizes the Tufts administration for dismissing pro-Palestinian arguments, and states, “We, as graduate students, affirm the equal dignity and humanity of all people and reject the University’s mischaracterization of the [student] Senate’s efforts.”
It’s hard not to think the American thought police have disappeared a promising student into their gulag archipelago for the alleged “crime” of publishing their political opinion in a college newspaper. It’s time to stop talking about “the threat of creeping authoritarianism,” because tyranny is already here, spreading fear on the streets of Greater Boston and elsewhere. An immigration activist, Lucy Pineda of United Latinos of Massachusetts, told WBUR that “the presence of so many military officers — often clad in military gear — reminded her of the 1980s civil war in her native El Salvador.”
Fittingly, El Salvador is also where the Trump cabinet member who oversees ICE — Kristi Noem of Homeland Security — happened to be on Wednesday. She was there to visit CECOT, or the Terrorism Confinement Center — already one of the world’s most notorious prison hellholes — and to film a propaganda video in front of half-naked male prisoners behind the iron bars of the Salvadoran lockup (a move which, in the context of war, would violate the Geneva Conventions).
“This facility is one of the tools in our tool kit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people,” said Noem, an admitted dog murderer, referring to 238 Venezuelan nationals flown to CECOT by ICE without any sort of legal due process, and allegedly in violation of a judge’s order to turn the flights around.
Again, it’s hard to say which is more horrific about this: that news accounts are revealing the human beings Noem describes on the video as “terrorists” include a professional soccer player and a gay makeup artist who were apparently apprehended because of their innocuous tattoos, that another prisoner is there because ICE mistakenly believed he was someone else, or that Noem’s video before the head-shaved prisoners reminded some watchers of images of the Holocaust.
Both the Ozturk arrest and the Noem video did receive media attention this week, but they were not the big story. That honor, of course, went to the gobsmacking revelation that the top national security officials in the Trump regime had not only discussed their recent Yemen attack plans on the commercial app Signal but also accidentally included a top journalist in the chat. That is indeed a huge story, and until late last night, I’d planned to write about this — especially the callous attitude toward an operation that killed civilians, including, allegedly, two children.
But I’d note that a) the Yemen strike is a symptom of U.S. militarism run amok in the Middle East that’s been building over decades, and b) the media seems to be relieved because this tale of high-level gross incompetence falls within its comfort zone, while the hour-by-hour plunge into police-state fascism is something elite journalists are still struggling to comprehend. But we need to put stories like Ozturk’s disappearance out front because we are in great danger of not keeping the republic that was founded right here in Philadelphia.
The pace of the authoritarian outrages is accelerating like a 1970s heavy-metal drum solo — the arrest of a leading farmworker activist in Washington state, the ICE hunt for a valedictorian and Columbia student for participating in a protest, and so many other efforts meant to discourage legal dissent and terrorize immigrants who once believed America was a beacon for seeking a better life.
We cannot look away from this, as much as many would like to. We have to make a choice. We can capitulate to the fascism you can see clearly on the streets of Somerville (or even grovel, as the president of NPR did Wednesday before Congress, in nauseating fashion). Or we can resist, knowing there are great risks, yet also knowing the risk of doing nothing is even greater.
I choose to resist, and I hope you will pick this route, as well.
It was heartening to see images late Wednesday of roughly 2,000 people who came out in Somerville for a hastily called protest, demanding the release of Ozturk. It’s also important right now for anyone who believes that, like Ozturk, they may be endangered for exercising their First Amendment-protected free speech to know their rights in dealing with ICE or other law enforcement. If an ICE agent knocks on your door, you are not legally obligated to let them in. So don’t.
Yes, it’s appalling when top officials like the secretary of defense or the vice president give away state secrets that might endanger our troops. But what’s happening right now in broad daylight, on our formerly free sidewalks, endangers every one of us. Until we can again walk those streets without fearing masked secret police from our own government, no one is safe.
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