The parable of Rümeysa Oztürk
May 11, 2025
Iris in the hollow (2017) Rocky Mountain iris in bloom in Lake Creek Coulee, north of Odessa, WA
How Kristi Noem, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump arrested themselves
It is a good thing Americans, especially Americans, are learning the story of Rümeysa Oztürk. What seemed, at first and second glance, to be a brazen act of intimidation has instead become a potent lesson in how the souls of deceitful people can evaporate in the light of day.
Call it karma if you will.
As many of you know, Rümeysa Oztürk is the Tufts University graduate student—in the United States as a Fulbright scholar with an F-1 student visa—who was arrested just north of Boston on March 25th by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. ICE is the law enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). After Ms. Oztürk was quickly flown to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, DHS released a statement explaining that “glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for a visa issuance to be terminated.”
Former South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem—a woman familiar with fabrication—is the director of DHS. Former U.S. Senator Marco Rubio is now the U.S. Secretary of State. He has taken personal responsibility for the revocation of Oztürk’s visa and hundreds of others. Two weeks after her arrest Rubio said he thought it was “stupid” to “welcome” people “who are going to go to your universities as visitors and say ‘I’m going to your universities to start a riot..’ We don’t want it in our country. Go back and do it to your country.” “Every time I find one of these lunatics I take away their visa,” he added.
We know—now for certain—this was pure slander.
There was never any evidence that Rümeysa Oztürk intended to hurt anyone, or provoke a riot. It’s simply not in her nature, as someone who is known, in the Tufts community, for her civility and engagement with others. The focus of her research at Tufts has been in the field of child study and human development. Like millions of others who live and breath in America, she has strong opinions about the atrocities inflicted on civilians in Gaza.
Rümeysa Oztürk, in white coat (via security camera) being taken into custody by masked ICE agents on March 15th.
A year before her arrest she had co-authored a guest column in the Tufts University student newspaper. It’s not exactly a cauldron of boiling oil. It was addressed to the Tufts University president—entitled Renewing calls for Tufts to adopt March 4 TCU Senate Resolutions. I’ll come back to this.
There is a trend here that Trump, Rubio and Noem have followed since taking office in January—to have people arrested and held incommunicado, without due process of law—while repeatedly branding them as terrorists and insurrectionists. But the truth is just the opposite—because it is Noem and Rubio and Trump who’ve been using fear tactics to silence and manipulate, all the while trampling on constitutional rights to free speech and due process.
To the extent there was a live question as to why Rümeysa Oztürk had been singled out for an ICE abduction it was ‘what else?’—as in what else did the government have on her that could warrant her being whisked away with plans to deport her?
That question was settled Friday, in a ruling from U.S. District Court Judge William Sessions. There was nothing else—simply the year-old guest column she had co-written. At the hearing the government’s lawyers had the opportunity to cross examine Rümeysa Oztürk and put forth other evidence. They chose not to.
And here’s what’s noteworthy about this: the gist of the column was to persuade the university president to support resolutions from the university senate incorporating findings that Israeli forces were culpable for genocide on Palestinians in Gaza who’ve been killed, injured and subjected to famine as the Israeli Defense Forces seek to root out Hamas terrorists.
From this alone Kristi Noem’s DHS concluded that Oztürk engaged in “anti-Israeli activism” “in support of Hamas” because the guest column she co-authored had called upon Tufts to divest from companies with ties to Israel.
As legal analyst and former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann (see video below, hosted by Jennifer Rubin) points out, by this definition about half the citizens of Israel could be considered pro-Hamas, simply by speaking out to oppose the Israeli assaults on Gaza. The international human rights organization, Amnesty International, has accused Israel of genocide for attacks on Gaza that have killed or injured more than 100,000 non-combatants. Does that make Amnesty International a pro-Hamas, terrorist sympathizing organization? Does that mean any criticism of the Israeli military is a threat to U.S. foreign policy; that we’re now going to deport foreign students for voicing their opinions on atrocities committed by U.S. allies? Seriously? Because that’s the logic that was used to abduct Rümeysa Oztürk and whisk her off to Louisiana in the hopes that a southern judge would be more amenable to its arguments than Judge Sessions was on Friday, when he ordered her release.
Judge Sessions, whose courtroom is in Vermont, found there was “absolutely no evidence” that Rumeysa Ozturk poses any danger and that her arrest violated her rights to free speech and due process. Remarkably, the judge had to reconvene the proceedings when the government—after being instructed to release her immediately, resisted and sought to compel her to wear an ankle monitor. The judge swiftly rejected it.
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As of this morning, Rumeysa Ozturk is back, and free, in Massachusetts.
It has been a signature of the Trump movement that—even more than money—it requires fear and gobs of disinformation. It’s such a conditioned practice that it requires scant, if any, internal reflection, let alone evidence.
Witness the domineering weirdness of Donald Trump’s recent interview with ABC’s Terry Moran, where Trump repeatedly insisted that the image of Kilmar Abrego-Garcia’s knuckles—photo-shopped with the letters MS-13 on them—was genuine. Facing resistance, Trump & Co. simply try to impose their will, in the face of all evidence to the contrary. When an apology is required, they reach for venom instead.
In that sense, the saga of Rümeysa Oztürk, who says she loves America, is not so different. What gives it power and visibility is that finding the truth about her and about what the Trump government did—to abduct her, and silence her for lending her name to a single and relatively mild guest column in a student newspaper—is not hard. Her’s is a powerful story because it is so obviously appalling; the ordeal she endured, with the added distress of asthma attacks brought on by the stress of her abduction and confinement.
On the other side? A story of ruthlessness and a betrayal of the nation’s intrinsic ideals—a story that connects Trump, Noem, Rubio and the others to a plainly premeditated and treacherous act. We can’t be both the ‘land of the free’ and the country that reserves the right to terrorize people like Rümeysa Oztürk who have every right to peacefully protest and call our attention to complicity in genocide. We are better than this, and because we are, we can see how this story ends for the people who perpetrated and condoned this—with their repudiation and removal from power. Yes, they arrested Rümeysa Oztürk. But in the eyes of history they also arrested and sullied themselves. We will not forget this.
Mothers and Magpies
Finally, happy Mother’s Day. If my mother were still with us, I’d be with her, this morning, delivering a bouquet of lilacs. I miss her, and my eulogy for her, a postcript to my Beautiful Wounds book can be found here at the Rhubarb Skies website.
…and Magpies. A new photo spread (with field notes) about these gregarious winged creatures is available (for free) here, Flights of the Ghost Bird , for those of you who may share my fascination with this very smart and colorful creature. The mother magpies often wear a crown of mud, and I can explain that. They are no less regal for it…
—tjc
