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The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges. 

The sound of her panicking voice is hard to shake. It is her voice, and it also could be the voice of someone you love. 

On Tuesday night (March 25), Rumeysa Ozturk, a Ph.D. student on a valid student visa at Tufts University, was walking on a street in Somerville when a man in a hoodie and a baseball cap approached her. that has since gone viral and that everyone should watch captures how things unfolded. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he says, holding up his hand to intercept her. Ozturk tries to evade him when other similarly dressed figures appear to surround her. We know now that they were Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in plain clothes. They grab her phone, and go for her hands, tug at her backpack. It is obvious how overwhelmed she feels, making shrieking sounds from the sheer distress of suddenly being surrounded and handled by multiple male strangers in a public space. The sound of her panicking voice is hard to shake. It is her voice, and it also could be the voice of someone you love. It is painful to watch her body language and sense her fear. She’s pleading with them.  “We’re the police. Relax,” one of them tells her. “You don’t look like police,” a voice off screen says, and is ignored. “Why are you hiding your faces?,” the voice adds, as indeed these figures eagerly hide their faces as they realize that neighbors take notice. This is only days after Columbia University from the administration to ban masks at campus events to prevent participants from concealing their identity. to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, apparently in violation of a federal court order from later on Tuesday. That order directed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE to give the court 48 hours’ notice before attempting to remove her from Massachusetts. 

Something like this has happened to many, many thousands of people. They were accosted by agents of the state who often were not visible as such from a distance, or who perhaps just emerged from an approaching car, and ripped from what frequently will just have been an ordinary moment on an ordinary day. They were on their way somewhere, or on their way home. Disappearances like this are well-known from authoritarian regimes. One might think of Argentina during the Junta or the German Democratic Republic. But this is happening in Somerville, Massachusetts. This is happening in the United States of America. And it is happening in 2025. And if you think this is how criminals should be treated, then bear with me.  

What is happening here? , a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said: "Rumeysa Ozturk is a Turkish national and Tufts University graduate student, granted the privilege to be in this country on a visa. DHS and ICE investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans. A visa is a privilege not a right. Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated. This is commonsense security." 

Before saying anything else: The term “commonsense security” when used by this administration should make us pause, especially this week. For this when through a stroke of exceptional carelessness, some of President Trump’s key decision makers got caught discussing sensitive military operations in great operational detail. They had not noticed that a journalist had inadvertently been included in their group on Signal. Now we also know that they are using juvenile emoji to celebrate the death of human beings in military strikes. And afterwards it is the journalist . (See my earlier pieces on gaslighting.)  

Details of the Ozturk case are still emerging, but it seems the only evidence available to back the claim that she was supporting Hamas is an opinion piece she co-authored in the Tufts campus newspaper . This article was part of the ongoing discussion at Tufts about what to make of the situation in Gaza and touched on matters such as the International Court of Justice’s declaration of a unfolding in Gaza and divestment from Israel. Regardless of what one thinks about these positions, they are widely held among people with views on the situation. (My own view of that situation .) There must have been hundreds and hundreds of articles debating these matters over the last months, quite a number of them articulating similar views. The 2024 piece does not mention Hamas and does not do anything that would even remotely count as glorifying or defending terrorism. Referring to the ICJ assessment of a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza, or defending the view that what Israel is doing in Gaza counts as genocide, do not amount to acts of terrorism or acts of glorifying terrorism.  

Snatching Rumeysa Ozturk from the street for co-authoring this article is wrong. Legally, it seems, people who are in the United States and who are not citizens have due process rights, . The due-process parts of this situation are being sorted out as we speak. And perhaps the government will offer more evidence than what is known so far, in which case this piece here will need to be revised.  But given how unsettling and in fact terrifying to many people an arrest under such circumstances predicably will be, one would think the government would have been prepared to offer such evidence by now.  

Arresting someone and invalidating their status for holding an opinion that is well within the spectrum of debatable views on a matter that has already become a generational issue is a profound violation of both American values and human rights.

The main thing to say is this. Non-citizens may not have legally protected free-speech rights but arresting someone and invalidating their status for holding an opinion that is well within the spectrum of debatable views on a matter that has already become a generational issue is a profound violation of both American values and human rights. It is wrong. And it has nothing to do with a visa being a privilege rather than a right: that it is a privilege does not mean that once granted it can be taken away capriciously. What makes the United States different from an authoritarian regime is that there is a spectrum of opinions on many political issues on which reasonable people would disagree but that all of them get to articulate.  What makes the United States different is that we as American citizens stand up for other people’s rights to contribute to such debates regardless of their legal status. We value them for their views and what they have to say to substantiate them. We value them as humans. For non-citizens who are also members of our communities to participate in such debates is a way of honoring American values. Grabbing them from the street the way Ozturk was, is a way of dishonoring American values. It is also a way of making a mockery of human rights. Freedom of speech and opinion is a human right (see e.g., Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) – and that means people have this right in virtue of being human and not in virtue of being a citizen or having any other legal status. Everyone in the United States of America has the whole list of human rights. And we should all be proud to live in a country that works this way and make our contribution to keep it so.  

Thousands who are not citizens, who are women, who are minorities, or who are Muslims are looking at this thinking 'this could be me.”'

People are frightened. Rumeysa Ozturk was frightened. Again, her voice is hard to shake. It is her voice, but it could be the voice of someone you love, maybe the person you love most.  She was frightened because she articulated an opinion that millions of people share but of which some people do not approve in a country that should value and protect free speech. And those who disapprove of her opinion were the ones to send the agents who ripped her from a life on a Tuesday evening. Thousands who are not citizens, who are women, who are minorities, or who are Muslims are looking at this thinking “this could be me.” This is the society we live in, and we should all care about it. There are too many cases like this already. Way too many, and it is only two months into this administration.  

Those of us who were around Harvard Square when the doxxing trucks started to appear in the week of October 9, 2023, will remember how many photos of female students who were clearly Muslim, marked as such by religious head scarves, were paraded on these trucks. The doxxing trucks were wrong, and this arrest is wrong.   

Addendum as of March 28

It is worth adding three points to this post.

1. By now, nothing has emerged about Rumeysa’s activism except her co-authorship of the article mentioned earlier. She was clearly not a leading figure in campus protests. She merely was one in four authors of an article in a campus newspaper that did nothing to glorify violence, terrorism, and specifically Hamas. Other than that, she was a PhD student in a child development program. What this means is that everyone who is not a citizen will from now on have to fear that their name will appear on some list somewhere that the government might pick up eventually – and then snatch them from the street and have them deported. And there is no guarantee that they will not find some arcane law also that enables them to do something similar to citizens when they can be brought into a connection with alleged terrorism, perhaps by publishing articles, or perhaps just by attending events.
2. It is stunning to watch a video of about Rumeysa’s arrest. As he responds he is visibly agitated, taking the posture of a fierce defender of the homeland against violent intruders. What he says is as shocking as it shameless. He talks about student activists availing themselves of visas only to then vandalize and tear up our campuses, harass students, take over buildings, and “create a ruckus” (a formulation he uses more than once). He says he wants to send a message to everyone that if they come to the U.S. for such purposes they will be deported.  The only thing Rumeysa did was publish an article in a campus newspaper that did nothing to glorify violence. Rumeysa does not deserve this inhumane outburst from a man who wields power but has clearly lost his moral compass.
3. The signal Rubio is sending is nonetheless clear. “Do not come to the U.S. if you do not agree with the government – we will find ways of getting to you and we have ways of really hurting you.” that came out in the Chronicle of Higher Education today, philosopher and scholar of fascism Jason Stanely explains why he is leaving Yale to join the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, as historian Timonthy Snyder (author of On Tyranny) has already done: “The Munk School wants to be the world center for who they think are the best scholars to create a place where journalists and scholars from democratically backsliding countries can come.” As far as I’m concerned, the Harvard Kennedy School also wants to and should continue to be such a world center. And we can continue to be so. But we must understand what we are up against and what is at stake.