Rümeysa Öztürk is the Tufts University grad student abducted off the street in Somerville, MA, on March 25 by Homeland Security. If you can stomach watching the confusion and terror of this young woman as masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel grab her, video is here.

h/t to Ryan Pancoast on Bluesky

The terror didn’t end there. Per this AP article, After being taken to New Hampshire and then Vermont, she was put on a plane the next day and moved to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in remote Basile, Louisiana.

Why was Öztürk targeted? She’s one of several students at American universities whose visas were revoked after they expressed support for Palestinians during the ongoing conflict in Gaza. 

This strategy was laid out in Project Esther, the Heritage Foundation’s plan to use anti-terror and immigration laws to crush pro-Palestinian demonstrators under the guise of combatting anti-semitism. The fascists have made it crystal clear they’re going to use pro-Palestinian protest as the launching point to crush dissent in this country–ALL dissent. That’s why they went after Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil earlier in March. I shared Kelly Hayes’s piece on Khalil here and have been meaning to update that post with Khalil’s statement which you can find here.  Note: Khalil’s statement was dictated over the phone from where he’s being held in an ICE facility in, you guessed it, Louisiana.

The one piece of good news in all this is that yesterday, in a rare show of moral courage by a university, Tufts issued this University Declaration for Rumeysa Ozturk. I encourage you to read the entire declaration which includes a valuable timeline of events as well as full-throated support for their student.

 Today, Öztürk’s legal team had a hearing with a federal judge on jurisdiction (being sent out of state to Louisiana). That decision will come soon. A legal journalist live-posted this thread on Bluesky during the hearing.

If you’d like to contribute a few dollars to Öztürk’s legal fund, you may do that HERE.

Please do not remain silent while the U.S. government disappears people. Please understand that if we normalize what is happening, they will eventually come for you, too.