This article was originally published by James Bovard at The Mises Institute.
On March 25, six masked federal agents seized a Turkish graduate student on the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts. Rumeysa Ozturk—who was wearing a hajib—is a Fulbright scholar working on a doctorate at Tufts University.
She was abducted and vanished into the maw of the federal prison system. The Trump administration ignored a federal court order and took Ozturk from Massachusetts to Louisiana federal detention facilities.
But the Trump administration knew Ozturk had criticized the government of Israel a year earlier, enough to seal her doom according to the latest iron-fisted political correctness dictates. She co-authored one piece for the Tufts student newspaper criticizing the university’s refusal to divest from Israel despite “credible accusations of…. indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide.”
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson justified the takedown: “DHS and ICE investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans. Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated.” Ozturk never mentioned Hamas in her op-ed. Ozturk has not been linked to any campus protests at Tufts or elsewhere. The feds have failed to reveal any evidence Ozturk supports Hamas. She simply co-wrote an opinion piece. As the New York Post noted on Friday, DHS “alleged that Ozturk was a supporter of Hamas but has yet to provide any evidence to that effect.” On Friday evening, federal judge Denise Casper blocked the Trump administration from deporting Ozturk and ordered the administration to respond by Tuesday to Ozturk’s legal challenge (now aided by the ACLU) to her detention.
The video of the arrest spurred tidal waves of online cheering. When Secretary of State Marco Rubio was asked about the case while traveling in Guyana, he justified revoking Ozturk’s visa:
If you apply for a visa… and you tell us that the reason you are coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds but because you want to participate in movements that vandalize universities, harass students, take over buildings, and cause chaos—we’re not giving you that visa.
Rubio added: “It’s crazy—stupid, even—for any country to let people in who say, ‘I’m going to your universities to riot, take over libraries, and harass people.’ We gave you a visa to study and earn a degree—not to become a social activist tearing up our campuses.”
Rubio promised: “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas.”
Is criticizing a foreign government now considered proof of lunacy in the White House? Does the Trump administration consider op-eds to be a weapon of mass destruction?
The First Amendment doesn’t specify that it only applies to people that the White House approves. Former ICE Chief of Staff, Deborah Fleischaker, slammed the targeting of Ozturk as “a First Amendment violation. ICE had a policy in place that said that First Amendment activity was not to be the basis of enforcement action. That’s not why you enforce.”
Has the Trump administration gone full Nixon barely two months after the inauguration? In 1973, Nixon White House aide, Tom Charles Huston, lamented in congressional testimony the tendency of the FBI “to move from the kid with a bomb to the kid with a picket sign, and from the kid with the picket sign to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposing candidate. And you just keep going down the line.”
The Nixon administration’s systemic paranoia led it to launch preemptive attacks on its suspected opposition, from secretly searching psychiatrists’ offices to bugging the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate. Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972 did not save him from the exposure of the cover-up of White House crimes.
The Trump administration is demanding that universities provide the feds with details on the “national origin/ethnicity/shared ancestry” of students who were involved in protests that were allegedly antisemitic. Is the Trump administration going to require colleges to conduct DNA tests to determine the precise amount of Arabic, Turkish, or Iranian pedigree of suspects? Lawyers suggested that the “list was meant as a tip sheet that the administration might use to target or deport foreign students who participated in protests,” according to the Washington Post. One lawyer predicted a “witch hunt” would result from such lists.
Trump policymakers have a simple solution to end the protests: prohibit some universities “from having any foreign students if it decides too many are ‘pro-Hamas,’” according to senior Justice and State Department officials. One senior Justice Department official told Axios:
What you’re going to see in the not-too-distant future is the universities that we can show that we’re not doing anything to stop these demonstrations in support of Hamas — or encouraged enrollment by activists — we can stop approving student visas for them, and they can no longer admit [any] foreign students.
American history demonstrates that persecution that starts with foreigners often snowballs into targeting American citizens. Three months after the 9/11 attacks, Attorney General John Ashcroft proclaimed in congressional testimony: “To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and…give ammunition to America’s enemies.” In other words, critics were traitors—regardless of how many civil liberties Ashcroft actually destroyed. And the definition of pernicious speech continually expanded. In 2004, former New York City Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik, stumping for President George W. Bush’s reelection campaign, told audiences: “Political criticism is our enemy’s best friend.”
To subvert freedom of speech after 9/11, it wasn’t necessary for the feds to formally nullify the First Amendment. One of the nation’s most prominent pundits, Michael Kinsley, admitted in 2002 that he had been listening to his “inner Ashcroft”: “As a writer and editor, I have been censoring myself and others quite a bit since September 11.” Kinsley conceded that sometimes it was “simple cowardice” that sparked the censorship. I experienced plenty of such cowardice from editors after 9/11 and long beyond.
The Ozturk case provides an opportunity to clarify the meaning of free speech in American life. Five years ago, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, some progressive prosecutors acted as if looting and burning were simply free speech on amphetamines. The legal impunity that protestors received helped spur widespread carnage and billions of dollars of property damage.
Few Americans would object to deporting foreign students who destroy property or physically assault other people. But Ozturk was merely guilty of using words that are detested by the current administration. Are Trump’s policymakers using the same “guilt by association” standard the Biden administration used to persecute anyone near the Capitol on January 6, 2021? Biden’s Justice Department acted like anyone who merely “paraded without a permit” near the Capitol that day was guilty of insurrection and deserved a harsh prison sentence. Is any criticism of Israeli policy now the legal and moral equivalent of insurrection?
More than 30 Democratic members of Congress sent a letter on Thursday to Rubio and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem demanding information on the case in which the video “looked like a kidnapping.” But what if the Trump administration believes itself entitled to kidnap anyone who espouses an idea it disapproves? And what will be the next opinion to sanctify broad daylight federal kidnappings?
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