A group of high-profile Democratic lawmakers has called on the Donald Trump administration to immediately release the Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, praised her “unwavering spirit” and warned that the White House is engaging in “repression”.
In a New York Times essay published on Friday morning, the US senator Ed Markey and representatives Jim McGovern and Ayanna Pressley, who all represent Massachusetts, where Tufts is based, shared more details from their visit to Öztürk this week at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention center in Louisiana, where she has been held since her arrest last month.
“She was inadequately fed, kept in facilities with extremely cold temperatures and denied personal necessities and religious accommodations” and has “suffered asthma attacks for which she lacked her prescribed medication” the lawmakers wrote.
“Despite all this” they added, “we were struck by her unwavering spirit.”
The lawmakers were part of a delegation of congressional Democratic lawmakers who traveled to Louisiana this week to visit both Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil, the recent Columbia University graduate and Palestinian activist who is also being held in Ice custody at a separate facility in Louisiana.
Öztürk, who co-authored an opinion essay last year in the Tufts student newspaper that was critical of the university’s response to Israel’s attacks on Palestinians, was detained in late March and transferred to Louisiana. Neither she nor Khalil have been charged with any crimes and appear to have been targeted solely for their political views in a Trump administration crackdown that goes far beyond the undocumented immigrant communities that Trump pledged to expel when he was running for a second term.
“This is not immigration enforcement” the lawmakers wrote. “This is repression. This is authoritarianism.”
They warned that Öztürk’s case “is not an isolated one.
“This administration has already overseen a wave of unconstitutional actions: raids without warrants, prolonged detentions without hearings and retaliatory deportations,” they wrote.
The lawmakers cautioned that each case “chips away at the rule of law”, “makes it easier for the next to go unnoticed”, and “brings us closer to the authoritarianism we once believed could never take root on American soil.
“When a government begins to imprison writers for their words, when it abandons legal norms for political convenience, when it cloaks oppression in the language of national security, alarm bells must ring. Loudly,” they wrote.
They called for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to release Öztürk immediately, to drop any proceedings against her and to investigate the conditions at the detention center where she is being held.
They also urged their Republican colleagues “to stand up to President Trump’s evident disregard for the rule of law.
“And we urge every American to understand: This is not someone else’s fight,” they conclude. “The Constitution is only as strong as our willingness to defend it.”
Also, in Khalil’s case, lawyers for DHS disclosed in court documents that they did not have a warrant when they arrested him last month.
The attorneys representing the administration argued on Thursday that “officers had exigent circumstances to conduct the warrantless arrest” and said that agents believed Khalil would “escape before they could obtain a warrant”.
Khalil’s legal team has argued that Khalil’s removal proceedings should be terminated since he was arrested without a warrant. His lawyers also stated that Khalil had no plans to flee or leave the country, and emphasized that he “fully complied with the agents arresting him, despite the fact that after repeated requests by Khalil, his pregnant wife, and his lawyer, they never showed him a warrant”. His wife has since given birth while Khalil was not released for the event.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
