Writing a pro-Palestinian op-ed can get you kidnapped by Trump’s Gestapo and then deported

“Detained” is such a genteel word:

Dramatic footage had emerged on Wednesday evening of the moment US immigration officials, wearing masks and hoodies, detained the Tufts University doctoral student in Massachusetts in the street, handcuffed her and bustled her into an unmarked car.

Ozturk was detained on Tuesday by federal immigration agents, and on Wednesday was being held at the South Louisiana Ice processing center, according to the government’s Ice detainee locator page.

The video, taken from a security camera on a building, shows Ozturk walking along the street when she is approached by several masked figures, who forcibly take her phone and backpack and place her in handcuffs. The officials, some with badges around their neck, all have their faces covered. . .

After she screams, an unseen onlooker can be heard responding.

“Is this a kidnapping?” asks the bystander, who appeared to be recording the arrest, footage that later circulated on social media.

In separate security-camera footage, the agents can be heard responding: “We’re the police.”

The bystander replies: “You don’t look like it. Why are you hiding your faces?”

The transfer of Ozturk appeared to violate a federal court order from Tuesday, which directed the DHS and Ice to give the court 48 hours’ notice before attempting to take her out of Massachusetts.

A federal judge then ordered DHS and Ice to respond in court on Thursday morning to an emergency habeas corpus request to produce Ozturk.

Tuesday’s detention is the latest in a series of arrests of students who are not accused of any crime but have been involved in pro-Palestinian activism on student campus, in a sharp escalation of anti-immigration crackdowns and attacks on political speech by the Trump administration. . . .

News reports say that Ozturk had been involved in pro-Palestinian activism at Tufts. She had co-written an op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper, criticizing the university’s response to Israel’s attacks on Gaza and Palestinians.

“DHS and [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] 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,” the spokesperson told the Associated Press on Thursday.

The DHS did not provide examples of Ozturk’s support of Hamas, which is designated by the US government as a terrorist organization.

“Rumeysa has been my student, colleague, friend for over a decade,” Reyyan Bilge, a friend of Ozturk, posted on X. “She does not carry a hateful bone in her body let alone being antisemitic.”

Other friends and colleagues said she was not closely involved in pro-Palestinian protests that broke out on campuses last spring. Her only known activism, they said, was co-authoring an op-ed in a student newspaper that amplified a vote in the student senate group calling on the university to engage with student demands to cut ties with Israel.

“To my knowledge, the only thing I know of that Rumeysa organized was a Thanksgiving potluck,” said Jennifer Hoyden, a close friend of Ozturk’s who studied with her at Columbia University’s teachers’ college in New York. “There’s a very important distinction between writing a letter supporting the student senate and taking the kind of action they’re accusing her of, which I’ve seen no evidence of.”

Given these kinds of authoritarian terror tactics, and the pitifully weak response to this point from the people who run America’s colleges and universities, this kind of development is hardly surprising:

Jason Stanley, Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale and author of multiple books—including How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them—said he finally accepted Toronto’s long-standing offer for a position on Friday after seeing Columbia University “completely collapse and give in to an authoritarian regime.”

In a move that has unnerved faculty across the country, Columbia’s administration largely conceded to demands from the Trump administration, which had cut $400 million of the university’s federal grants and contracts for what it said was Columbia’s failure to address campus antisemitism. Among other moves, the Ivy League institution gave campus officers arrest authority and appointed a new senior vice provost to oversee academic programs focused on the Middle East.

“I was genuinely undecided before that,” Stanley said. Now he’s leaving Yale to be the named chair in American studies at Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. According to the university, the intent is for Stanley also to be cross-appointed to the philosophy department. Two popular philosophy blogs previously reported the move.

“What I worry about is that Yale and other Ivy League institutions do not understand what they face,” Stanley said. He loves Yale and expected to spend the rest of his career there, he said; while he still hopes for the opportunity to return some day, he’s nervous Yale “will do what Columbia did.”

Stanley said Toronto’s Munk School “raided Yale” for some of its prominent professors of democracy and authoritarianism to establish a project on defending democracy internationally—an effort that began long before the election.

Also leaving Yale for the Munk School is Timothy Snyder, author of books including The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, and Marci Shore, author of The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution and other works. Snyder and Shore are married.

Stanley said Toronto reached out to him back in April 2023, during the Biden administration, and he restarted conversations after the election. He finally took the job Friday. The university told Inside Higher Ed it had been trying to recruit Snyder and Shore for years, saying, “We’re always looking for the best and brightest.”

Snyder, the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale, will become the Munk School’s inaugural Chair in Modern European History, supported by the Temerty Endowment for Ukrainian Studies. A spokesperson for Snyder said he made his decision for personal reasons, and he made it before the election.

In an emailed statement Wednesday, Snyder said, “The opportunity came at a time when my spouse and I had to address some difficult family matters.” He said he had “no grievance with Yale, no desire to leave the U.S. I am very happy with the idea of a move personally but, aside from a strong appreciation of what U of T has to offer, the motivations are largely that—personal.”

But when asked for her reasoning, Shore told Inside Higher Ed in an email that “the personal and political were, as often is the case, intertwined. We might well have made the move in any case, but we didn’t make our final decision until after the November elections,” she wrote.

Shore, a Yale history professor, will become the Munk School Chair in European Intellectual History, supported by the same endowment as her husband.

The mid-20th century emigration of so many great scholars to American universities — including many of the scientists whose work was critical to winning the war against fascism — is being played out again in reverse. It not only can happen here, it is happening, right in front of our eyes.