Masked Thugs Kidnap Another Student Off the Street

The “they” in question here are apparently ICE agents, though they seemed to carry no identifying uniforms or badges. In a repetition of the Mahmoud Khalil disappearance, they snatched the Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk off the street in Somerville, Massachusetts, apparently for the crime of writing op-eds for her university’s newspaper in support of Palestine and pushing back against leadership’s actions. A Turkish citizen, Ozturk is here legally on a student visa, though apparently Tufts leadership was informed that her visa had been revoked late on Tuesday. As of this writing, the ICE detainee locator lists her as being in custody, but does not list the facility where she is being held. Even her lawyer doesn’t know her she is.

“We are unaware of her whereabouts and have not been able to contact her,” her lawyer said, according to reporting from the New York Times and elsewhere.

It is worth stating clearly, since stories like that from the Times and similar outlets continue, in the face of overwhelming evidence, to refuse to do so: This is fascism. It is what happens in a dictatorship. It does not happen in a functioning democracy. It will not stop at people on university campuses who opposed a genocide in Gaza, or at Venezuelans with tattoos who had followed rules about applying for asylum. “Dictatorship” isn’t something that just gets applied retroactively in textbooks to distant places; it can, in fact, happen here, and it will be marked by more and more masked agents of the state, blithely ignoring the questions about their shyness, as they put another person who said the wrong thing into the back of a van.