When immigration agents grabbed Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk off the street near her home in Somerville, Massachusetts, on March 25, it looked like her only crime was cowriting an anti-Israel op-ed that had appeared in the school newspaper a year earlier. It still looks that way a month later, despite the government's vague allusions to additional evidence supporting Ozturk's removal from the United States.
"It is unthinkable that a person in a free society could be snatched from the
street, imprisoned, and threatened with deportation for expressing an opinion the
government dislikes," the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) says in a brief it filed on Tuesday in support of Ozturk's challenge to her treatment. The brief in Ozturk v. Trump, which was joined by the National Coalition Against Censorship, the Rutherford Institute, PEN America, the Cato Institute, and the First Amendment Lawyers Association, notes that Secretary of State Marco Rubio deemed Ozturk deportable "not because the government claims she committed a crime or other deportable offense" but "for the seemingly sole reason that her expression—an op-ed in a student newspaper—stirred the Trump administration to anger."
Ozturk, a Turkish citizen, was pursuing a Ph.D. in child study and human development at Tufts. Her arrest "doesn't really make sense, because she wasn't a figure on campus," Najiba Akbar, a former Muslim chaplain at Tufts, told The New York Times last month. "I don't think she was active in banned groups like Students for Justice in Palestine. From what I know, she was doing her thing, doing her Ph.D."
