The disappearing of Rumeysa Ozturk is state-sponsored terrorism

The disappearing of Rumeysa Ozturk is state-sponsored terrorism

Will Bunch writes:

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. [Continue reading…]

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