[This is wrong on so many levels.]
99.999% of the time, thereâs no monsters in the streets. But not 100% of the time. On Tuesday evening, federal authorities abducted Tufts PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk off the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts. A neighborâs security camera caught it on video, and itâs horrifying.1 Sickening though it is, I urge you to watch it (with audio), because we should all bear witness to this disgrace.
Itâs chilling to witness six people without uniforms descend upon a lone student, pulling masks over their faces as they seize her.2 Ozturk must have feared this was a kidnapping rather than an arrest. An unidentified voice certainly does, stating that those involved donât look like the police and repeatedly asking why theyâre hiding their faces. As Ozturk is eventually handcuffed and loaded into an unmarked SUV, she is rightly terrified.
We all should be. This shouldnât happen anywhere, but it certainly shouldnât happen on an American street. This atrocity has hit especially close to home for me. I went to college at Tufts University and Iâve lived in Somerville. In fact, I spent a good deal of time in a house no more than 100 feet from the spot where Ozturk was snatched up. Knowing Iâve walked down the very same sidewalk is especially devastating.
A Boston Globe piece (unfortunately paywalled) extensively quotes a neighbor named Joe Ferraro:
âI donât care what she was doing,â Ferraro continued. âYou canât just nab people off the sidewalk and throw them in a car and take them away, and expect anyone whoâs seen it to be alright afterwards.â
The sudden arrest has shattered the sense of calm on the residential street. After seeing the footage of plainclothes ICE agents emerging from their unmarked cars, Ferraro said he is now on edge for anyone loitering in the area.
I share Ferraroâs dismay. As to what Ozturk was doing, thus far, her arrest appears to have been as unwarranted as it was cruel. The government stated that they cancelled her student visa, but they have provided no concrete reasons as to why. When asked about it, Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke vaguely and irrelevantly about âlunaticsâ who âcreate a ruckusâ. That does not apply to Ozturk.
As best as anyone can tell, Ozturk was targeted because she co-authored an op-ed that criticized Tufts Universityâs response to the Israel-Hamas conflict. Masked and non-uniformed federal agents snatched a doctoral student off the street and tossed her in an unmarked vehicle for something she wrote in a college newspaper a year earlier. Thatâs a despicable attack on the freedom of speech within America.
Things in this country are bad and theyâre getting worse. Iâm dismayed by what has happened in recent months and truly frightened about what will follow. But I am also heartened by the groundswell of support for Ozturk, from the aforementioned unidentified voice of resistance to protests thousands strong which quickly sprang up around Boston.
While I donât know exactly how we can combat this wrong, I am certain that speaking up, and speaking out, is the right move for everyone. Back to Joe Ferraro:
âPart of me is afraid to talk about it,â [Ferraro] said. âBut come pluck me off the sidewalk then, if thatâs what you get for talking about it.â
Come pluck me off the sidewalk then, too.
Footnotes:
That video is archived here. ↩︎
These agents work for the same administration that is demanding a ban on mask-wearing by peaceful protestors. ↩︎