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    Rümeysa Öztürk, Tufts student held by Ice, vows to continue legal action after jail release

    A Tufts University student from Turkey has returned to Boston, one day after being released from a Louisiana immigration detention center where she was held for more than six weeks after being arrested for her political speech.Rümeysa Öztürk told reporters at Logan Airport on Saturday that she was excited to get back to her studies during what has been a “very difficult” period.“In the last 45 days, I lost both my freedom and also my education during a crucial time for my doctoral studies,” she said. “But I am so grateful for all the support, kindness and care.”A federal judge ordered Öztürk’s release Friday pending a final decision on her claim that she was illegally detained following an op-ed she co-wrote last year criticizing her university’s response to Israel and the war in Gaza.She filed a lawsuit challenging her detention now assigned to US district judge William Sessions in Burlington, Vermont. He granted her bail after finding she had raised substantial claims that her rights were violated.Öztürk said she will continue her case in the courts, adding, “I have faith in the American system of justice.”“Today is a tremendous day as we welcome you back, Rumeysa,” Ed Markey, a Democrat senator from Massachusetts said. “You have made millions and millions of people across our country so proud of the way you have fought.”Appearing by video for her bail hearing the previous day, Öztürk, 30, detailed her growing asthma attacks in detention and her desire to finish her doctorate focusing on children and social media.Judge Sessions ruled that she was to be released on her own recognizance with no travel restrictions. She was not a danger to the community or a flight risk, he said, while noting that he might amend the release order to consider any conditions by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or Ice, in consultation with her lawyers.Sessions said the government offered no evidence for why Öztürk was arrested other than the op-ed.The US justice department’s executive office for immigration review did not respond to an email message seeking comment.Öztürk was one of four students who wrote the opinion piece last year in campus newspaper The Tufts Daily. It criticized the university’s response to student activists demanding that Tufts “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide,” disclose its investments and divest from companies with ties to Israel.On 25 March immigration officials surrounded Öztürk in Massachusetts and took her into custody. She was then driven to New Hampshire and Vermont and flown to a detention center in Basile, Louisiana.Her student visa had been revoked several days earlier, but she was not informed of that, her lawyers said.Öztürk is one of several international students detained by the Trump administration over their pro-Palestinian advocacy on campus.Öztürk’s lawyers first filed a petition on her behalf in Massachusetts, but they did not know where she was and were unable to speak to her until more than 24 hours after she was detained. A Massachusetts judge later transferred the case to Vermont.A state department memo said Öztürk’s visa was revoked following an assessment that her actions “‘may undermine US foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization including co-authoring an op-ed that found common cause with an organization that was later temporarily banned from campus”.A department of homeland security spokesperson said in March, without providing evidence, that investigations found that Öztürk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, which the US has designated as a terrorist group.This week a federal appeals court upheld Sessions’ order to bring Öztürk back to New England for hearings to determine whether her constitutional rights, including free speech and due process, were violated, as her lawyers argue.Immigration proceedings for Öztürk, initiated in Louisiana, are being conducted separately in that state and Öztürk can participate remotely, the court said. More

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    Woman says Boston hotel guard told her to leave bathroom because she ‘was a man’

    A couple visiting Boston says they were left confused and appalled after being forced out of the Liberty Hotel during a Kentucky Derby party on Saturday, following what they describe as being confronted and wrongfully accused in the women’s restroom.Ansley Baker and her girlfriend, Liz Victor, both cisgender women, said a hotel security guard entered the women’s bathroom and demanded Baker leave the stall she was using, claiming she didn’t belong there.“All of a sudden there was banging on the door,” Baker recalled to CBS News.“I pulled my shorts up. I hadn’t even tied them. One of the security guards was there telling me to get out of the bathroom, that I was a man in the women’s bathroom. I said: ‘I’m a woman.’”Victor, waiting by the sinks, heard the commotion and saw the security guard confronting Baker.“I looked down and I saw her shoes and that’s when I was like: ‘What is going on?’” she told the network.The couple said that once Baker was being escorted out, other women in line hurled insults, calling her “a creep” and demanding she be removed. Security staff then allegedly asked both women to show their IDs to confirm their gender. After a heated exchange, they were told to leave the hotel.View image in fullscreenIn a statement shared with CBS, the Liberty Hotel accuse the two women of sharing one stall: “An incident occurred at the Liberty Hotel on Saturday, May 3 where several women alerted security of two adults sharing a bathroom stall. The bathroom was cleared out as two adults in one stall are not permitted. After leaving the bathroom, a member of the couple from the stall put their hands on our security team and it was then that they were removed from the premises.“The Liberty Hotel has a zero-tolerance policy for any physical altercations on our property. The safety of our guests and staff is our priority, and this event is under investigation. The Liberty Hotel is and always will be an ally of the LGBTQ+ community and a place where everyone is welcome and celebrated.”Later on Tuesday, the Liberty Hotel said it had now “concluded the investigation into the situation that occurred on May 3rd”, in a fresh statement shared with the Guardian that appeared to take a different stance on the incident.The security officer involved in the incident was being “suspended from their position immediately” following the hotel’s investigation.The statement also added that the general manager was reaching out to the individuals involved, and that the hotel was conducting “mandatory retraining for all staff on inclusive practices and guest interaction protocols, with a particular focus on creating a safe and welcoming space for LGBTQ+ individuals”.The statement went on: “In a reaffirmation of our values, the hotel is making a donation to a local LGBTQ+ organization that we have partnered with in the past, on International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia (IDAHOBIT), on May 17.”It then repeated a point made in the earlier statement: “The Liberty Hotel is and always will be an ally of the LGBTQ+ community and a place where everyone is welcome and celebrated.”Baker and Victor had insisted in interviews with local media that they were never in the same stall and disputed the hotel’s initial account of events.“Once the stall door opened, and I’m the only one in there, it escalated further,” Baker told Boston News 25. “I don’t think that aligns with what they’re saying.”The couple said they have made sure that Boston mayor Michelle Wu’s office was aware of their experience in hopes that they can stop a similar situation from happening to anyone else.They also hope their experience can spark awareness and change.“We know we’re not the only ones that face this kind of thing,” Baker said to CBS. Victor added: “It was a very scary situation, but trans women experience this every single day in the US and across the world.”The Guardian has not been able to reach the couple for comment.The incident comes at a time of heightened tension between the administration and the LGBTQ+ community. Some of Donald Trump’s earliest moves in office were to sign executive orders directing the prohibition of gender transitions for people under the age of 19 and banning trans athletes from competing in women’s sports.On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order called “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”, instructing the federal government to remove “all radical gender ideology guidance, communication, policies, and forms”.Trump has also limited access and funding for LGBTQ+ arts, with orders that instruct arts organizations not to fund projects that promote “gender ideology” as well as appointing himself chair of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.The incident also echoed an ongoing Republican talking point centered on bathrooms and gender identity. In November 2024, the South Carolina Republican Nancy Mace introduced a bill to ban the representative Sarah McBride from using the bathroom that corresponds with her gender identity. Speaker Mike Johnson has supported and subsequently enforced that ban. More

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    Democratic lawmakers call for release of Tufts student from Ice detention

    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.View image in fullscreen“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. More

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    Massachusetts governor calls Trump’s attacks on Harvard ‘bad for science’

    Massachusetts governor Maura Healey said on Sunday that Donald Trump’s attacks on Harvard University and other schools are having detrimental ripple effects, with the shutdown of research labs and cuts to hospitals linked to colleges.During an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation, the Democratic governor said that the effects on Harvard are damaging “American competitiveness”, since a number of researchers are leaving the US for opportunities in other countries. After decades of investment in science and innovation, she said: “intellectual assets are being given away.”In the past week, the US president cut off billions of dollars to Harvard in federal funds, after the university refused to concede to a number of the administration’s demands. Trump also called for its tax-exempt status to be revoked, a potentially illegal move, against the world-famous college in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Of the moves against colleges, Healey said: “It’s bad for patients, it’s bad for science, and it’s really bad for American competitiveness. There’s no way a state can make up for the cuts from federal funding.”She added: “I was in a hospital recently, Boston Children’s, where some of the sickest kids in the country receive care. Cuts to Boston Children’s and other hospitals are a direct result of Donald Trump’s actions, as these are part of a teaching hospital system.“These cuts to universities have significant ripple effects, resulting in layoffs of scientists and doctors, and clinical trials for cancer treatments have been shut down.“As governor, I want Massachusetts and America to soar. What Donald Trump is doing is essentially inviting other countries, like China, to take our scientists and researchers. This is terrible, especially considering what he has done to the economy. I am working hard every day to lower costs in my state, cut taxes, and build more housing, while Donald Trump is making life more expensive and harder for all of us.”Since Trump took office, his administration has deployed an “antisemitism taskforce” to demand various policy changes at different universities around the country.Columbia University, one of the first institutions targeted by the taskforce, quickly caved to the Trump administration’s demands to restore $400m in federal funding. Some of the measures that Columbia conceded to included banning face masks on campus, empowering security officers to arrest people, and placing control of the Middle Eastern department under a new senior vice-provost.Former Columbia University president Lee Bollinger said on Sunday that the Trump administration’s attacks on academic institutions represent a significant attack on first amendment rights.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This is a kind of weaponization of the government’s power,” Bolinger said on CNN, adding that it “seems like a campaign of intimidation”.“This is a kind of weaponization of the government’s power,” he said.Earlier this month, the federal government sent Harvard two separate letters with specific demands. After the university publicly rejected those demands, the administration quickly froze nearly $2.3bn in federal funding.The conflict between the administration and the elite university took a strange turn on Friday, with the New York Times reporting that an 11 April letter from the administration with additional demands – which escalated the showdown – was “unauthorized”. The university disputed that the letter was “unauthorized,” claiming the federal government has “doubled down” on its offensive. More

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    The Trump-Harvard showdown is the latest front in a long conservative war against academia

    The showdown between Donald Trump and Harvard University may have exploded into life this week, but the battle represents just the latest step in what has been a decades-long war waged by the right wing on American academia.It’s a fight by conservatives that dates back to Ronald Reagan, the hitherto spiritual leader of the Republican party, all the way to McCarthyism and beyond, experts say, as the rightwing scraps to seize more control in a manner that is “part of a standard playbook of authoritarianism”.Trump reacted furiously this week after the president of Harvard University, the US’s oldest, richest and most prestigious college, refused to acquiesce to demands that would have given the government control over whom it hired and admitted, and what it taught.But the anger was not just that Harvard had refused to roll over. It was that the move represented, for the time being, a step back for the Trump administration in what some believe is part of a wider attempt to overhaul US democracy at large.“It’s as dangerous as anything I’ve ever experienced in my lifetime,” said Todd Wolfson, the president of the American Association of University Professors.“They’re attempting to undermine and destabilize and ultimately control higher education. And at one level, it’s an assault on higher education, at another level, it could be seen as prevalent to a full-on assault on democracy. So I think this is a threat to the future of the United States of America, and because of this country’s role in the world, a threat to the entirety of the globe at this moment.”The government said on Monday it planned to freeze $2.2bn in grants and $60m in multi-year contract value to Harvard, hours after Alan Garber, the university president, said Harvard would not accept a series of demands made by the Trump administration. The demands included appointing a White House-approved external body to “to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity”, and that Harvard “immediately shutter all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs”.Garber said the government’s edicts “represent direct governmental regulation” of the school’s independence and constitutional rights.“No government – regardless of which party is in power – should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Garber wrote in an open letter, which was hailed by the left and by college professors concerned at the capitulation of other schools.Yet, as evidenced by Trump’s emotional post on Wednesday, the government’s assault on universities is unlikely to stop anytime soon, particularly if he is to emulate the kind of strongman leaders, such as the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, he has praised in the past.“[People in the Trump administration] have read their history, and they know that authoritarian regimes often target higher education as an independent sector and society, and aim to undermine it because of its role in creating an educated populace that could stand up to all forms of authoritarian rule,” Wolfson said.“And so this is part of a standard playbook of authoritarianism: to attack and to attempt to control or destroy higher education.”The move against universities has echoes of the efforts by the Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy in the middle of the 20th century to root out people he accused of being communists and Marxists. And like McCarthy, Trump’s efforts – led by a group of loyalists including the White House deputy chief of staff and head of policy, Stephen Miller – go beyond just universities. Trump has targeted some of the biggest law firms in the US with executive orders, prompting many to cave and pledge hundreds of millions of dollars of pro bono work to causes backed by the Trump administration.“The Trump administration is following the playbook of totalitarian dictatorships elsewhere in the world. It is trying to use the force of law to intimidate independent civic society organizations, so that opposition to its policies is impossible,” said Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard and co-chair of the university’s Council on Academic Freedom.“This new incarnation of the American right wing, with complete fealty to a single man, and an unprecedented attempt to disable civic society institutions like law firms and universities, is quite extraordinary.”The Trump administration has framed its move on Harvard and other colleges as an effort to crackdown on antisemitism, following protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, and as a move against alleged civil rights violations on campus. Few outside of the rightwing sphere see that as a good faith argument.“As a Jewish faculty member, I’m sensitive to antisemitism on campus, and it does exist and it should be combated. But the claim that Harvard is a bastion of antisemitism is just wild hyperbole. Three of our last four presidents who’ve served longer than a year have been Jewish. The fourth was married to a Jewish professor,” Pinker said.Harvard has found itself in the Trump administration’s crosshairs because of its status as the best known of America’s universities, one of the eight esteemed Ivy League schools. Thousands of influential figures across politics, media and business attended Harvard’s grand campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts; many of those who didn’t go to Harvard still tend to take an interest in its affairs.“We’ve got between 4,000 and 5,000 higher education institutions in the US. The Ivys always make headlines. The major cultural commentators in this country are obsessed with the Ivys, and have been for a long time. These are things that sell papers, they get a lot of clicks and a lot of attention,” said Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, a historian of US colleges and universities and the author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars.“The other thing, too, is what happens at your regional state public flagship university often follows from the trends that are set at the Ivys. Not only do they generate a lot of headlines, they are influential in that way.”Just as Harvard’s existence predates the founding of the US, rightwing antipathy towards universities has been brewing for a long time. When Ronald Reagan was running for governor of California in 1966, he used anger towards anti-Vietnam student protesters for political gain: one of his main campaign strands was a promise to “clean up the mess at Berkeley” – the state’s flagship university.Reagan’s tactics bear echoes of Trump’s. Ray Colvig, UC Berkeley’s chief public information officer at the time, told the university’s news service years later that Reagan “wanted to establish a special process to select faculty in several disciplines”.“In other words, he wanted to set a political standard for appointing faculty members. This idea was widely opposed, and it went away,” Colvig said.Reagan wasn’t the first to take on the universities. Shepherd said efforts to set up rival, conservative universities, date back to the 1920s, while McCarthy’s war on higher education came later. Ellen Schrecker, a historian and author of No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, wrote in the Nation recently that the Trump administration’s efforts were “worse than McCarthy”, and Shepherd said Trump’s attacks were “much more accelerated” than the communist-paranoid senator’s tactics.“McCarthyism, in the 1940s and 50s, the idea was to identify specific professors, hardly ever students, always faculty, and have them fired. Today, we’re seeing much worse than that. These are attacks on entire programs and departments. So entire departments like Black studies or DEI initiatives. It’s also not just relegated to the professors. We’re seeing students with their visas revoked being literally plucked off the streets,” Shepherd said.Trump hasn’t just targeted Harvard. Columbia University caved to a series of demands from the Trump administration in March, as a pre-condition for restoring $400m in federal funding, while the White House has announced funding freezes to other schools including Brown, Northwestern, Princeton and Cornell.Harvard taking a stand is one of the first signs of a fight back – even if it came after it was reported in March that the leaders of the university’s center for Middle Eastern studies were forced out, a move seen by critics as an attempt to appease Trump – and academics and others hope it could begin a resistance. It is likely to require a group effort to avoid the right wing’s goal for higher education in the US: universities that are in effect government-controlled, and where freedom of speech and thought is restricted.“The right don’t want students to hear about the legacy to slavery. They don’t want them to hear about structural inequalities,” Shepherd said.“They don’t want to hear why billionaires are bad. They don’t want to hear, from the sciences, about climate change. They want a nice, friendly experience where the most students ever get to debate is the differences in Aristotle and Plato.“They don’t want the actual debates that we see unfolding on campuses today.” More

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    Ex-Harvard Medical School Morgue Chief to Plead Guilty in Sale of Body Parts

    Cedric Lodge stole organs from cadavers that had been donated for medical research, prosecutors said. The university fired him in 2023.A former manager of the morgue at Harvard Medical School will plead guilty to stealing body parts that had been donated for research and selling them for thousands of dollars to people who collected them as macabre curiosities, according to court documents.The supervisor, Cedric Lodge, 57, who was fired by the university in 2023, had been entrusted with handling cadavers that were part of the medical school’s Anatomical Gift Program and were supposed to be cremated after the research on them had been completed, prosecutors said.But according to a sweeping federal investigation, Mr. Lodge turned the morgue into a shopping emporium for brains, skin and other body parts, supplying them to collectors in several states as part of a criminal network that involved several people, including his wife. Investigators said he drove the stolen body parts to his home in New Hampshire.The breach went undetected from about 2018 until March 2023, tainting one of the nation’s most prestigious medical schools.In a filing on Wednesday in federal court in Pennsylvania, Mr. Lodge agreed that he would plead guilty to one count of interstate transportation of stolen goods, which carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000. Under the plea deal, he will no longer face a conspiracy charge. Prosecutors recommended that he receive less than the maximum sentence, but a judge will make the final decision.In a statement on Friday, Dr. George Q. Daley, the dean of Harvard Medical School, condemned Mr. Lodge’s misconduct.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Tufts student detained for writing op-ed denied bail by US immigration judge

    A Turkish PhD student and former Fulbright scholar detained after co-authoring a campus newspaper op-ed about Gaza has been denied bond by an immigration judge, as her legal team continues to urgently petition a federal court in Vermont for her release.Rümeysa Öztürk, who had been studying at Tufts University, was seized by plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents on 25 March near her home in Massachusetts and shuttled through three states before landing in a Louisiana detention facility – all without being charged with any crime.An immigration judge denied bond on Wednesday, ruling Öztürk was both a “flight risk” and a “danger to the community” despite the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) only arguing the flight risk aspect, according to the petition filed by her legal team later that night.According to the documents, the DHS case against Öztürk in immigration court consists solely of a “one-paragraph Department of State memorandum” that revoked her visa, citing her co-authorship of an op-ed that had “found common cause with an organization that was later temporarily banned from campus”.“They don’t even show anything more than what was published in the op-ed,” said Esha Bhandari, an attorney from the American Civil Liberties Union who is representing Öztürk in federal court. “It’s fully constitutionally protected speech, no crimes at all … If this is allowed, anyone could be punished for anything they say.”Her federal attorneys are asking a federal judge to order her immediate release – which would supersede the immigration judge’s detention order – or, at minimum, to return her to detention in Vermont by Friday. They have also requested her federal case be expedited to 23 April, or the earliest available date.“It’s simply unconstitutional to keep her in detention for this,” Bhandari said. “We think that the court can decide it on the papers under the governing legal standards, but if it wants to hold a hearing, we’re asking for a hearing later in April. Time is of the essence; Rümeysa’s health is not well in detention.”Wednesday’s court filings from Öztürk’s legal team documented six asthma attacks since her detention began, with officers dismissing one episode as “all in her mind” while medical staff reportedly provided no treatment.Öztürk is among a long list of individuals connected to US universities who have had their visas revoked or been denied entry to the United States after the Trump administration’s aggressive stance in targeting pro-Palestine demonstrations or expressing public support for Palestinians. A Louisiana immigration judge similarly authorized the deportation of the Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, accepting the federal government’s assertion that he represents a national security risk.In late March, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, boasted that the state department had canceled at least 300 student visas related to pro-Palestinian protests, and that number has more than doubled since.When it comes to the visa termination process, Bhandari said that Öztürk, like other similarly targeted individuals, had “no opportunity to protect their rights” before the government changed their legal statuses. More

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    The US government is effectively kidnapping people for opposing genocide | Moira Donegan

    The abductors wore masks because they do not want their identities known. On Tuesday evening, Rumeysa Ozturk exited her apartment building and walked on to the street in Somerville, Massachusetts – a city outside Boston – into the fading daylight. Ozturk, a Turkish-born PhD student at Tufts University who studies children’s media and childhood development, was on her way to an iftar dinner with friends, planning to break her Ramadan fast.In a video taken from a surveillance camera, she wears a pink hijab and a long white puffer coat against the New England cold. The first man, not uniformed but wearing plain clothes, as all the agents are, approaches her as if asking for directions. But he quickly closes in and grabs her by the wrists she has raised defensively toward her face.She screams as another man appears behind her, pulling a badge out from under his shirt and snatching away her phone. Soon six people are around her in a tight circle; she has no way to escape. They handcuff her and hustle her into an unmarked van. Attorneys for Ozturk did not know where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the US homeland security department that has become Trump’s anti-immigrant secret police, had taken the 30-year-old woman for almost 24 hours.In that time, a judge ordered Ice to keep Ozturk, who is on an F-1 academic visa, in Massachusetts. But eventually, her lawyers learned that their client had been moved, as many Ice hostages are, to a detention camp in southern Louisiana, more than 1,000 miles (1,600km) from where she was abducted.In the video, before she is forced into the van, Ozturk looks terrified, confused. She may well have thought she was being robbed by street thugs; she did not seem to understand, at first, that she was being kidnapped by the state. She tries to plead with her attackers. “Can I just call the cops?” she asks. “We are the police,” one of the men responds. Ozturk remains imprisoned; she has been charged with no crime. In the video of her arrest, a neighbor can be heard nearby, asking: “Is this a kidnapping?”The answer is yes. Ozturk is one of a growing number university students who have been targeted, issued arrest warrants, or summarily kidnapped off the streets by Ice agents. She joins the ranks of include Mahmoud Khalil, the Syrian-born Palestinian former graduate student and green card holder from Columbia University; Alireza Doroudi, an Iranian-born mechanical engineering doctoral student at the University of Alabama; Yunseo Chung, a 21-year-old Columbia undergraduate who was born in South Korea but has long been a green card holder after immigrating to the United States with her parents at the age of seven; and Momodou Taal, a dual British and Gambian citizen who is studying for a graduate degree at Cornell University and has gone into hiding after receiving a summons from Ice to turn himself in for deportation proceedings.Many of these students had some connection – however tenuous – to anti-genocide protests on campuses over the past year and a half. Taal and Khalil, in different capacities, were leaders of protests for Palestinian rights at their respective universities. Chung attended one or two demonstrations at Columbia. Ozturk co-authored an op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper that cited credible allegations that Israel was violating international human rights law in Gaza and called on the university president to take a stronger stance against the genocide. In a statement regarding her arrest, a DHS spokesperson said: “Investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” They meant the op-ed.The state department claims that some of these students have had their visas or permanent resident status rescinded – in a video of the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, taken by his pregnant wife, agents proclaim that his student visa has been revoked, but when they are informed that he has a green card, they say: “We’re revoking that too.” This unilateral revocation of green card protections, without notice or due process, is illegal. But that is not the point – the Trump administration clearly thinks of immigrants as a population with no rights that they need respect.Rather, the point is that Trump administration’s promise to crack down on student protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza has the effect of articulating a new speech code for immigrants: no one who is not a United States citizen is entitled to the first amendment right to say that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, or that the lives of Palestinians are not disposable by virtue of their race.It is up to those us who do have citizenship to speak the truth that the Trump administration is willing to kidnap people for saying: genocide is wrong, Israel is committing it against Palestinians in Gaza, and Palestinians, like all people, deserve not only the food and medicine that Israel is withholding from them, and not only an end to Israel’s relentless and largely indiscriminate bombing, but they deserve freedom, dignity and self-determination. This has become an unspeakable truth in Trump’s America. Soon, there will be other things we are not allowed to say, either. We owe it to one another to speak these urgent truths plainly, loudly and often – while we still can.Here is another truth: that the US’s treatment of these immigrants should shame us. It was once a cliche to say that the US was a nation of immigrants, that they represented the best of our country. It is not a cliche anymore. For most of my life as an American, it has been a singular source of pride and gratitude that mine was a country that so many people wanted to come to – that people traveled from all over the world to pursue their talent, their ambition and their hopefulness here, and that this was the place that nurtured and rewarded them.It may sound vulgar to speak of this lost pride after Ozturk’s kidnapping – all that sentimentality did nothing, after all, to protect her, and may in the end have always been self-serving and false. But as we grapple with what America is becoming – or revealing itself to be – under Donald Trump, I think we can mourn not only the lost delusions of the past but the lost potential of the future.Ozturk – a student of early childhood education, and someone brave enough to take a great personal risk in standing up for what she thought was right – seems like a person the US would be lucky to have. Instead we are punishing her, terrorizing her, kidnapping her and throwing her away. She deserves better, and so do all of our immigrants – hopeful, struggling people who mistook this for a place where they could thrive. Who, in the future, will continue to think of the US as a place where immigrants can make a difference, can prosper? Who will share their gifts with us now?

    Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More