Friday marks one month since six masked federal agents seized Rumeysa Ozturk, a 30-year-old Turkish graduate student at Tufts University, on the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts. Ozturk has been slandered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and by Department of Homeland Security officials — at least according to a State Department memo that found that she had done nothing to justify seizing her without warning as if she was a terrorist kingpin. Well, she did write an oped for a college newspaper a year earlier, so….
Ryan McMaken of the Mises Institute and I had a rowdy 40 minute chat about the Ozturk case and the growing censorship peril on Wednesday. This is part of the Radio Rothbard series and will be online shortly. Ryan greenlighted the following excerpts from our interview.
The feds grab Ozturk (3 minutes): https://mises.org/mises-wire/first-they-came-op-ed-writers
The Trump administration is vanishing people on the streets of America like happened in Argentina in the 1980s (4 minutes).
Here’s the rough text of that second MP3 file:
Ozturk is simply a woman who co-wrote an op-ed that was downright tame compared to so many of the op-eds on both sides of this issue on the Gaza controversy over the last year and a half, but she was vilified by that. And it wasn’t just that, that someone said, okay you’ve gone too far, so we’re gonna take away your student visa.
No, she was put in leg shackles. She had a chain around her waist. She was frog marched out and she’s been in government detention, I guess almost a month now. If she was arrested on the 25th, . And I was curious about this ’cause I was thinking. What happened to Rosa Parks who was arrested after she protested the segregation on buses in Montgomery, Alabama?
And I was thinking how was she treated? And she was booked she was held at the police station for three and a half hours, maybe put in jail, Wrigley, but she was set free after less than four hours. And here you got this woman who co-wrote an op-ed and she’s been in shackles and changed and put in these detention facilities that are severely overcrowded and very disruptive for for almost a month.
And she didn’t know what was happening when she was first grabbed. She thought she might be killed and. There was a fasting line which she says, one of the federal officers told her, she said one of the federal officers down there says, we are not monsters.
We do what the government tells us. Oh, okay, so that proves you’re not a monster. I think that’s been around the track a few times. Historically, it didn’t do well in 1946 as a defense.
I believe there was a federal judge ordered on Monday or Tuesday. To move her back to Vermont from she’s down in, in Louisiana right now to move her back to Vermont or to move her to Vermont, . But the the Trump administration is filing an appeal or has filed an appeal. To try to block that so that they can keep her down in these crowded cells down there in the Southland.
And they’ve already sought to deport her. They’ve been blocked on that so far in court. So the thing about Ozturk, , she’s being treated like she’s a public enemy.
It doesn’t matter if she finally gets out, dragged around the country to these different detention centers being stuck in a very overcrowded ice detention center in Louisiana for weeks and weeks. This is a head [euphemism alert] screwing thing.
It’s something that changes a person’s life, but this is what the people in the Trump administration want. Part of what I was trying to figure out with the information from the State Department that, okay actually , there’s no evidence that she’s done anything wrong.
What I wonder is, was this a screw up by the Trump people or were they trying to send a message. That even though you haven’t done anything wrong, if you’ve simply co-signed one little news college newspaper oped, that’s enough to grab you off the street and act like you’re a top 10 terrorist.
Are they trying to frighten everybody into submission and into silence? She was calling for the university to honor the vote of the student Senate, I think, which had called for divestment. Okay, woman, that’s all it took. You’re gone. You vanished. She vanished. That’s, maybe that’s the right phrase. This is all it takes to make you vanish.
This is more like it was in Argentina, in the dark times down there, or in a lot of authoritarian countries around the world. . People don’t realize the history of habeas corpus and why it was such an important principle in 1215 and Magna Carta because rulers would make people vanish and simply to have their right to say, okay.
Bring forth the body, bring bring forth the person, give them a hearing. But, the Trump people aren’t doing that with Ozturk. it’s grim.
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https://mises.org/mises-wire/foreign-student-persecution-imperils-any-american-who-advocates-freedom
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