This Is Sickening

The Rumeysa Ozturk case should scare you

Two quick housekeeping things:

—I had a column in The New York Times yesterday that may be of interest to some of you.

—I have a bunch of events, listed here, coming up in Cambridge, New York, London, and hopefully even Amsterdam (you’ll see a form to fill out on the events page if you live in that neck of the woods and might be interested in attending).

The one I really hope my readers and listeners buy tickets for sooner rather than later is here:

4/28/2025 - An interview with David Zweig about his new book, An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions, Village Underground in NYC, 6:00 p.m. (tickets, which include a copy of the book — and remember there’s a two-item minimum as well, so come hungry or thirsty) (drinks after)

The reason I’m being a nag about this is it takes forever for a bulk preorder of books to get shipped, and until I have a good sense of numbers and/or the event sells out, I won’t know how many to buy. So if you think you might come, please, please buy a ticket now. For what it’s worth, a similar event with Rob Henderson at the same venue last year did sell out, so I hope that will be the eventual outcome — it’s just an unfortunate situation in which there’s some time pressure, even though the event is still a month away. Thank you!

---

Canary Mission is a far-right Zionist organization that “documents people and groups that promote hatred of the USA, Israel, and Jews.” It does so via an online enemies list.

On February 6, the organization published a page about Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University student pursuing a PhD in child study and human development (she’s been in the country for a while, having previously received a master’s degree from Columbia University on a Fulbright). Despite being under 300 words long, the entry is larded with extraneous information about Ozturk and (separately) Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack that doesn’t come close to painting her as a genuine threat to anyone. (The entry includes the sorts of specific personal information that reminded me a bit of Andrea James’ stalking website.)

Perhaps the entry is as larded as it is because it’s clear that Canary Mission has nothing on Ozturk other than that she “engaged in anti-Israel activism in March 2024,” with the link pointing to a Tufts Daily column Ozturk coauthored with three others writers. In it, they criticized the university’s president for not responding adequately to student senate resolutions “demanding that the University acknowledge the Palestinian genocide, apologize for University President Sunil Kumar’s statements, disclose its investments, and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.” She coauthored a column: That’s it. There’s nothing else listed on her entry other than that, and no one anywhere has credibly accused her of anything more specific.

You know what happened next. Here’s how it is described in the legal complaint subsequently filed by her attorneys:

[S]ix plain-clothes federal officers surrounded her on the street just outside her home in Somerville, MA. Rümeysa screamed as a man in a hooded sweatshirt grabbed her. Several other officers encircled her and soon covered their faces with masks. Rümeysa was handcuffed and escorted with an officer holding each arm into an unmarked vehicle. For more than 20 hours, her friends, family and legal counsel could not locate or contact her. After an exhaustive search, they learned that she had ultimately been removed from Massachusetts and sent more than 1,300 miles away to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana.

There’s video of her apprehension, if you have the stomach for it.

I can’t prove the Canary Mission listing directly led to Ozturk’s detention. I reached out to the organization via DM and, because it is run by deranged people, got responses like “Do you deny you are an anti-Zionist? Our answer to your questions are go to hell!” This is likely a reference to a quote from the influential Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Meanwhile, Betar US, an offshoot of a Zionist youth movement Jabotinsky himself founded, claimed to Al Jazeera that it provided a deportation wish list directly to the Trump administration.

That, too, is an unproven link. But these theories are as good as any, because the attempted deportation of Ozturk truly is a heinous and otherwise inexplicable act given that she wasn’t some sort of highly visible activist or leader (not that deportation would have automatically been justified in that instance, of course). It appears that Ozturk really did just coauthor a column — a totally anodyne one by the standards of this debate, whether you agree with it or not.

According the complaint, the Trump administration has cited two laws to attempt to deport Ozturk:

A letter dated March 25, 2025, and addressed but not provided to Rümeysa stated that her SEVIS [my link] designation “has been terminated pursuant to 237(a)(1)(C)(i) and/or 237(a)(4)(C)(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act.”⁵ See Exhibit A. On information and belief, a copy of the letter was provided to Tufts University.

The letter does in fact cite those two laws (immediate pre-publication note: now the letter is listed as “Sealed on PACER,” but that link worked earlier today and I did view it), and the complaint explains them in a footnote:

Section 237(a)(1)(C)(i) provides: “Any alien who was admitted as a nonimmigrant and who has failed to maintain the nonimmigrant status in which the alien was admitted. . . or to comply with the conditions of any such status, is deportable.” 8 U.S.C. § 1227(a)(1)(C)(i). Section 237(a)(4)(C)(i) provides: “An alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.” 8 U.S.C. § 1227(A)(4)(c)(i).

The complaint also notes that “This Provision expressly prohibits the Secretary of State from excluding or conditioning entry based on a noncitizen’s ‘past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations, if such beliefs, statements, or associations would be lawful within the United States,’ unless the Secretary personally certifies to Congress that admitting the individual would compromise a compelling U.S. foreign policy interest.”

Ozturk’s coauthored op-eds are very obviously “lawful within the United States.” So apparently the administration’s legal theory, such as it is, is that Secretary of State Marco Rubio can personally certify to Congress that because Ozturk coauthored a university newspaper op-ed criticizing Tufts University’s response to student senate resolutions that were critical of Israel, Ozturk “compromise[s] a compelling U.S. foreign policy interest.” To say that this makes defenders of Israel look like pathetic babies would be phrasing it too kindly.

As far as I can tell, it’s unclear whether the aforementioned “certification” process has taken place, but yesterday a journalist asked Rubio what Ozturk had done to warrant her detention, and he offered a revealing answer, via a White House transcript:

We revoked her visa. It’s an F1 visa, I believe. We revoked it, and here’s why — and I’ll say it again; I’ve said it everywhere. Let me be abundantly clear, okay. If you go apply for a visa right now anywhere in the world — let me just send this message out — if you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student and you tell us that the reason why you’re coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds, but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we’re not going to give you a visa. If you lie to us and get a visa and then enter the United States and with that visa participate in that sort of activity, we’re going to take away your visa.

Now, once you’ve lost your visa, you’re no longer legally in the United States, and we have a right, like every country in the world has a right, to remove you from our country. So it’s just that simple.

I think it’s crazy — I think it’s stupid for any country in the world to welcome people into their country that are going to go to their universities as visitors — they’re visitors — and say I’m going to your universities to start a riot, I’m going to your universities to take over a library and harass people. I don’t care what movement you’re involved in. Why would any country in the world allow people to come and disrupt? We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses. And if we’ve given you a visa and then you decide to do that, we’re going to take it away.

I encourage every country to do that, by the way, because I think it’s crazy to invite students into your country that are coming onto your campus and destabilizing it. We’re just not going to have it. So we’ll revoke your visa; and once your visa is revoked, you’re illegally in the country and you have to leave. Every country in the world has a right to decide who comes in as a visitor and who doesn’t.

If you invite me into your home because you say, “I want to come to your house for dinner,” and I go to your house and I start putting mud on your couch and spray-painting your kitchen, I bet you you’re going to kick me out. Well, we’re going to do the same thing if you come into the United States as a visitor and create a ruckus for us. We don’t want it. We don’t want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country, but you’re not going to do it in our country.

There’s a level of rank bullshit here that is on the one hand, perfectly standard within the world of politics, but on the other hand, terrifying given this specific context. Rumeysa Ozturk has neither been accused of any crime nor, according to her attorneys, has she ever been arrested for one. No one has provided a scrap of evidence she vandalized Tufts property, harassed students there, took over a building, or created a ruckus of any sort. Rubio seemed to be arguing that she lied on her visa application but no one, anywhere, thinks that if you’re a student in good standing and also decide to coauthor an op-ed, that means you lied about your intentions in coming to the United States to study(!).

What Rubio and his bosses are trying to do, via these guilt-by-association tactics — Ozturk wrote a pro-Palestinian op-ed, other Palestinian activists did bad or unlawful things, and therefore Ozturk has to go — is take every available measure to chill and outlaw pro-Palestinian advocacy, full-stop.

Barring its adoption of truly frightening legal theories, the administration can’t really do anything to directly punish American citizens for engaging in pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel speech. But it can try to stretch the law to the breaking point by targeting visa and green card holders, who are more vulnerable, and it can pressure universities to crack down on such speech with funding brinkmanship, such as it did with Columbia. If, for example, it conditions funding on adopting overly broad definitions of anti-Semitism that conflate it with criticism of Israel, mission accomplished.

These efforts are all going to spark lawsuits, especially in the case of public universities, which have to stick pretty close to the First Amendment in their disciplinary policies (Columbia is private). But whether these acts prove legal in the long run, after they wend their way through the courts, won’t really matter, first because Trump has unlimited taxpayer funds to spend on lawsuits, and second because in the meantime, while the final outcome is unclear, people naturally prefer not to be expelled from their university or deported from the country.

That’s the broader game the administration is playing to attempt to single out and punish and chill one form of clearly constitutionally protected speech. But I don’t want to take the spotlight off Rumeysa Ozturk, because she is still being detained in Louisiana. While it’s hard to fully hold this fact in one’s head given everything else that is always going on in the world (especially now), even a single person getting detained by the state is a very big deal. A huge amount of political philosophy and legislation and Constitutional thought and case law has been devoted to the question of when the government should be able to detain someone, and how to ensure the proper guardrails are in place so that it cannot do so capriciously.

Many of these guardrails have been demolished. I would have thought it too on the nose, even for the Trump administration, to try to ship someone back to Erdoğan’s Turkey for the infraction of. . . coauthoring a college newspaper op-ed expressing a viewpoint disfavored by the regime. But here we are. We’re living under an administration that admires the Erdoğanian way of doing business.

The last Trump administration was not as big a disaster as it could have been, because his cabinet — consisting of conservatives, yes, but not MAGA cultists — often refused to follow through on his grotesque demands, and often complained very publicly about them afterward. They saw something that deeply concerned them. Trump realized that to accomplish what he wanted to accomplish his second go-round, he needed to turn entirely away from qualified, establishment types and toward individuals whose only real qualification is their loyalty to him. (The most notable exception is Rubio, who has been completely co-opted by Trump and is now his loyal lieutenant.)

We are in nightmarish territory now. The government effectively disappeared Rumeysa Ozturk for 24 hours, making it impossible for her attorneys or anyone else to reach her. Yesterday, DHS secretary Kristi Noem posted a threatening video that employed, as props, the El Salvador torture prison we are now shipping deportees to (for, reportedly, crimes like having an autism awareness tattoo) and a group of inmates in a clearly overcrowded cell. This is an administration that clearly wishes it could act more like El Salvador or Turkey.

You should find these policies disturbing even if you don’t sympathize with the victims. The worst, most bloodthirsty fentanyl trafficker should not be shipped to a Salvadorian torture prison without due process. But it’s unclear why we, as citizens, should assume the Trump administration will stop with noncitizens. Trump is taking an approach — call it shock and awe or ready, fire, aim, or whatever you want — in which a PhD student on a sound, bog-standard F-1 student visa footing can be walking the streets of Somerville, MA one minute and find herself in a detention facility in Louisiana a seeming blink of an eye later. Our present government does not believe it needs to explain its actions, at least not until it has flown its victims across the country (or to another country, to a torture prison). What exactly would stop the Trump administration from picking out a domestic “enemy,” deciding they were an illegal immigrant, and giving them the same treatment?

Maybe I’m being overly dramatic but it’s unclear to me why we shouldn’t fear this, given just how out of control things are getting. And in the meantime, what the administration is doing to noncitizens is, again, terrifying. This is no longer a boy-who-cried-wolf thing. Save your “Trump Derangement Syndrome” idiocy. This really is the path toward authoritarianism, toward the complete breakdown of checks on executive power, toward the U.S. becoming something less than a free and open democracy. We might be headed toward completely unprecedented territory.

---

Questions? Comments? Unlawful detentions? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com, on Twitter at @jessesingal, and on Bluesky at @jessesingal.com. Image: Somerville, MA — March 26: Protesters gather at Powder House Park, during a demonstration opposing the detention of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national and Tufts University graduate student. (Photo by Erin Clark/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)