Signage and flowers are placed on a tree next to where ICE agents apprehended Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk on March 27, 2025, in Somerville, Massachusetts. Ozturk was arrested for purported activities related to terrorist organizations amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. (Photo by Scott Eisen/Getty Images)
Nearly 20 years ago, my wife and I were lucky enough to study abroad in England. We had been awarded graduate scholarships and obtained our student visas from the British government. At the time, there was a heartbreaking genocide happening in Darfur. As concerned students invested in the moral standing of our university, we joined peaceful protests calling on Oxford to divest from companies that profited from the genocide and urged the British Parliament to intervene.
I never feared that my exercise of free speech would get me arrested and kicked out of what I took to be the second freest nation on earth, after my own. And I certainly could not have imagined a swarm of British agents abducting me on the street and deporting me without cause. Perhaps in the time of King George III but not the age of constitutions.
On Tuesday, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University in Boston, was walking peacefully to the university’s Interfaith Center to break her Ramadan fast when six government agents in masks and hoodies surrounded her and took her away screaming in an unmarked SUV.
For a day or more, according to Fox News, Rumeysa’s family and lawyers had no idea where she was and were unable to contact her. No charges were filed against her. A federal district judge even ordered the government not to move her out of state. But she was moved anyway — to a detention center in Louisiana, awaiting deportation.
Rumeysa had a valid student visa, as Fox News also reported. She was awarded a prestigious Fulbright Fellowship to complete her Ph.D. at Tufts’ Department of Child Study and Human Development, where she researches children and media. No charges were filed against her and there was no warrant for her arrest; warrants are issued by judges who require the government to show cause.
The best guess for why she has been detained is that her name appeared with several others on an article in the student newspaper last year calling on Tufts University to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and divest from companies with ties to Israel. The op-ed never mentioned Hamas, which the U.S. government rightly considers a terrorist organization. There is no evidence that she harbored any sympathy for, much less aided and abetted, Hamas or other organizations opposed to the United States. It seems her only “crime” was to peacefully speak out, as a concerned student, in a manner disfavored by the current administration.
Americans may freely disagree about the heartbreaking conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, which has left thousands of innocent Israelis and hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians dead or injured in recent years. For my part, having traveled to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, and believing in the state of Israel as a necessary response to the evils of the Holocaust (in which Jewish family members of mine were killed), I take seriously the conclusions of the International Criminal Court and Amnesty International that Israel’s war in Gaza is a “plausible” genocide.
But regardless of what we believe about Israel and Palestine, there is one thing on which Americans overwhelmingly agree: our constitutional right to freedom of speech under the First Amendment is sacred and immigrants who lawfully reside among us are not without rights of their own. As you uphold my right to call the war in Gaza genocidal, I defend your right to call Hamas an evil terrorist organization. In fact, I’ll join in that because it is also true.
Freedom of speech is as American as apple pie. It’s what has attracted many of the brightest minds from foreign lands to come here legally as students and help make America the richest, most innovative nation on earth — including Elon Musk.
Sadly, Rumeysa is not alone. She is one of hundreds of lawful immigrants so far who have been targeted for deportation by the Trump administration in recent weeks, without any pretense of due process. Their abductions on American streets by unmarked and unidentified “law enforcement” agents are being funded by our tax dollars to the tune of untold millions.
So far we have seen at least seven other students detained for showing sympathy for Palestinians; hundreds of Venezuelan migrants deported to a Salvadoran prison camp against the orders of a federal judge, and extended detentions and physical abuse of lawful migrants at the American border. These and countless other acts represent an unprecedented abuse of federal power against individuals whose lack of citizenship gives them limited legal recourse, in spite of their legal status in this country.
Given the choice, I still believe my fellow Americans would choose the Constitution over a man who would be king. It’s time we make that choice — not just for Rumeysa but for this country we love.
This commentary was first published by the New Hampshire Bulletin, which like NC Newsline, is part of the national States Newsroom network.
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