It’s happened again, or should we say, it’s happening again. At Tufts University in greater Boston this week, Donald Trump’s immigration Nazis — in hoodies, plainclothes, and masks that hide their faces — abducted a student from the street and disappeared her. It sounds like they’ve shipped her to Louisiana, like they did with Mahmoud Khalil. She’s here entirely legally on a student visa, a PhD student and Fulbright scholar from Türkiye. No official reasons have been given, because Trump and his Nazis don’t think human beings they don’t like deserve due process, but it appears it might have been about an article she wrote in the school newspaper.
Better hope you haven’t written any letters to the editor that might hurt Tiny Hands’s feelings, because as soon as he decides he thinks he can do this with citizens, hoo boy, it will be far too late. It may already be.
Her name is Rumeysa Ozturk, and the Tufts University school paper is as good as any other place for the tick-tock of what happened.
As of yesterday, Ozturk’s attorney said they were “unaware of her whereabouts and have not been able to contact her.” District Court Judge Indira Talwani ruled last night that Ozturk shouldn’t be moved out of Massachusetts without notice. And now it’s of course been revealed that they’ve abducted her to Louisiana, where they think the district judges are Nazis just like them and will do whatever they want them to do, far away from people who might be able to help their human trafficking victims.
Now, the DHS/ICE thugs are saying Ozturk had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas,” though it sounds like their definition of “in support of Hamas” is as loose and bigoted as they want it to be. (You know, just like how they’re kidnapping any Venezuelan man they can find with a tattoo and saying the tattoo proves gang affiliation. Somehow Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth walks free, despite his own white supremacist extremist tattoos. But we guess that’s different.)
Her “crime”? (She is not accused of any crimes.) From what anybody can tell, it’s being bylined on a piece in the Tufts paper in support of the Palestinian people, and asking the university to listen to the demands of student activists and protesters. You know, like the First Amendment in the United States goddamned fucking says she’s allowed to do.
If the US government has anything else, it sure hasn’t proven it, because these vile scum don’t think they have to.
Here’s more from the Tufts paper:
The student, Rumeysa Ozturk, is a Turkish national and doctoral candidate in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development. Ozturk is a teaching fellow, works as a doctoral research assistant at Tufts’ Children’s Television Project and completed a master’s degree at Teachers College, Columbia University, as a Fulbright Scholar. […]
Coalition for Palestinian Liberation at Tufts and Palestinian Youth Movement called for an emergency rally to take place at 5:30 p.m. this afternoon in an Instagram post early this morning.
“We will fill the streets of Somerville and Raise Our Banners. We won’t let Trump take our students and immigrant neighbors without a fight,” the post reads. [They had that rally. It was huge. — Ed.]
In March 2024, Ozturk coauthored an op-ed in the Daily, calling on Kumar to endorse Tufts Community Union Senate resolutions for the university to recognize genocide in Gaza and divest from Israeli corporations. Canary Mission, a website with the stated purpose to “document people and groups that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on North American college campuses,” cited the article as “anti-Israel activism.”
“Rumeysa was likely targeted after being recently doxxed by Canary Mission,” the CPLT post reads.
Here is a Chris Hayes report from last night, which includes all of the above, plus chilling surveillance video of the abduction. It is some authoritarian terrorist bullshit:
And here is the unedited video:
This is Donald Trump’s shithole America.
This is what Trump’s administration is doing to innocent people expressing their rights to free speech, and to universities, under the laughable pretense of “fighting antisemitism,” even though Trump’s administration is full of antisemites, even though Trump himself babbles antisemitic tropes as often as he breathes, even though he dines with literal Nazis. Even though literal neo-Nazis are creaming themselves now that Trump is president, certain that this is their moment.
Catherine Rampell had an excellent piece in the Washington Post just yesterday morning on that, illustrating what an absolute joke it is for the Trump administration to pretend it’s actually on the side of Jewish people:
It takes a lot of chutzpah to claim to be combating antisemitism while coddling avowed antisemites. Multiple senior Trump aides have embraced the antisemitic “great replacement theory” and delivered Nazi salutes (or rather, harmless waves that so closely resemble Nazi salutes that even self-proclaimed Hitler admirer Nick Fuentes called them “excessive”). Administration officials have also lately canoodled with Germany’s Holocaust-downplaying far-right party, with Elon Musk urging Germans to get over their country’s “past guilt” already.
One senior Trump official at the Pentagon recently amplified neo-Nazi conspiracy theories about Leo Frank, a Jewish man lynched by an antisemitic mob in Marietta, Georgia, a century ago. (The case helped lead to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.)
And of course Trump himself has often played footsie with white supremacists, flattering them as “fine people” who should “stand back and stand by.”
Like we said, an absolute joke. Because in Trump’s fucked up authoritarian Nazi nightmare, he and his thugs think they get to decide who is a real Jew, just like they get to decide who is a real American.
The MAGA movement supports Jewish people like pedophiles support children.
Do not be confused about the stakes here. If these pigs think they can do this to legal visa-holders, who hold opinions they don’t like, without due process, they think they can do it to citizens who hold opinions they don’t like. This is just foreplay for their sick kinks. If you like what these students have been protesting for, or if you don’t, well, that’s your right in the United States of America, just as it’s these students’ right to protest, and to be entirely clear, there is no universe where speaking out against Benjamin Netanyahu’s vile authoritarian government or its actions constitutes material support for fucking Hamas.
Fuck off with that shit.
Fuck off with all this.
We don’t know how many times we have to link to the famous Martin Niemöller quote, but hey, guess we’ll do it again. It’s featured prominently at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Though we’re sure Elon Musk and his DOGE boys will find some way to delete that sooner or later, too.
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