She was disappeared by ICE for the crime of writing an op-ed that gave the Trump administration the sads. A judge released her.
If there is one thing that has been a constant from the very beginning, it’s that the Trump administration only supports free speech as long as it’s speech that they just happen to agree with. If it’s speech that the far right disagrees with, then those people will get punished to the fullest extent of the law. Sick fuck, Roger Stone, recently took it all the way and said that political opponents to the Trump administration should receive the death penalty, implying that he’s basically OK with the idea of fellow American’s being killed for their constitutionally protected speech. The most disturbing part of the story is not that people are saying something so unAmerican, but the fact that such rhetoric has been normalized by the media as some outlets cast it off as some minor political story.
Back in March, one of the other disturbing escalations of Trumps war on free speech is the story about how a student co-authored an op-ed offering criticisms of her university. The op-ed itself was rather mundane and called on the university to allow to have students to have a voice on where their tuition money was going to get invested. That generally was it.
The problem, however, was that the Trump administration was unhappy that someone was saying something they personally disagree with. So, in response, masked ICE goons in unmarked vehicles pulled up to her in broad daylight, threw the cuffs on her, shoved her in said unmarked vehicle, and disappeared her. The Trump administration defended the act of disappearing her for her legally protected speech by falsely claiming that she was glorifying Hamas. The op-ed, of course, did no such thing. Even if she was, that still doesn’t give rise to authorities outright disappearing her like that in the first place.
Recently, we learned one rare bit of good news. A judge overseeing the case has decided to have her released. From TechDirt:
Get this, though: it turns out that kidnapping celebrated foreign PhD students in broad daylight for writing mild criticism of their own university is not even remotely constitutional or reasonable.
Thankfully, a judge has now freed her and made it quite clear that nothing the government is weakly arguing in this case makes any sense at all.
U.S. District Judge William Sessions, who is presiding over the case, said at the conclusion of Friday’s bail hearing that Ozturk raised “very substantial” and “very significant” claims that her First Amendment and due process rights were violated when she was taken into custody following the revocation of her student visa in March.
“Her continued detention cannot stand,” he said.
Not that it should matter — because it doesn’t — but at least with many of the other people the administration has targeted, they could craft some sort of (absurd) rationale for why they did what they did. Here there was none. Just that she once co-authored a fairly benign op-ed.
Let’s be clear about what happened here: A Fulbright scholar wrote something that made someone in the administration sad, and their response was to send masked men to make her disappear. Cool system we’ve got! Very normal democracy stuff. America. Land of the free.
Everything about how they treated her was cruel and unusual. Obviously, punishing her for her speech is a blatant First Amendment violation. But even if the government wanted to argue that she was no longer welcome in this country (which is absurd, given that she’s a Fulbright scholar doing really useful child development work, including how to make sure kids have more prosocial uses of the internet and technology), they could have alerted her that her student visa was being revoked, and given her a time period in which she’d need to leave the country.
They didn’t do that. They just sent masked, non-uniformed people to kidnap her off the street. Then they quickly moved her out of Massachusetts to Vermont, and then from Vermont to Louisiana. Then, while detained in Louisiana, they refused to give her the asthma medication she relied on, and it was reported that the stress was causing regular and dangerous asthma attacks.
It’s funny how every accusation is a confession with this American administration. The far right has long argued that a tyrannical government was going to take away people’s rights, have people arrested for thought crimes, and basically turn the US into a police state. Now that Trump is in power, we are seeing exactly that happening. Naturally, the far right are largely either silent on this issue or they are actively applauding these autocratic move to silence people because they said something that they personally disagree with. Naturally.
The good news is that Rumeysa Ozturk is now free. What happened to her clearly should never have happened. The fact that the administration couldn’t even pin anything other than a mundane op-ed on her really cements the fact that this was clearly an unlawful arrest in the first place. Either the administration finds some sort of real wrong-doing that gives rise to making these actions justified or she should get released. As it turns out, the answer was the latter: release her.
Hopefully, this incident sends a clear signal that there will be pushback if the administration decides to simply disappear people they personally disagree with. I doubt it considering the Trump administration has proven time and time again that they are incapable of learning anything. Still, at least there was a positive outcome in all of this for now.
