Second in a two-part series. Read part one here.
911 operator, March 25: “Somerville 911, this line’s being recorded.”
Caller: “Hi. Um. I just watched a woman while resisting get pushed into the back of a car.”
Operator: “Where?”
Caller: “I’m in Somerville, Massachusetts, just next to the Tufts campus ... These, like, three guys popped out and grabbed her and pushed her into a car.”
Operator: “Did you get a description on the males?”
Caller: “They had masks covering their faces.”
On the evening of March 25, Rümeysa Öztürk was seized by federal agents while talking to her mother in Turkey on the phone. When the line went dead, her mother called a friend: Something has happened to my daughter. That friend contacted an immigration lawyer.
Mahsa Khanbabai was at her home outside Boston when the call came, cooking one of her kids’ favorite dinner, Lubia Polo, a fragrant Persian dish of rice and green beans.
The words of the woman on the phone came tumbling out: Öztürk’s scream and plea for help, then silence. And now Öztürk was missing.
Could be an ICE arrest, Khanbabai thought.
Khanbabai, now 54, had long been a prominent immigration lawyer. An immigrant herself, she was born in Iran and raised in Western Massachusetts. Her father, a physician, had come to the US on a J-1 visa, a type issued to scholars, specialists in certain fields, and others.
The recent government detention of Mahmoud Khalil, the pro-Palestinian protester at Columbia, had generated such a national firestorm that Khanbabai needed to have a brief conversation with herself. My God, if this is going to be like Khalil’s case, do I want to get involved?
She knew she needed to do what was right: Use the law to help a Tufts University graduate student swept off the street and into federal custody. She realized, she recalled to the Globe, “What happened to Mahmoud Khalil is probably going to happen to Rümeysa.”
Khanbabai knew Öztürk needed a habeas corpus petition filed on her behalf immediately. Habeas is a constitutional right that allows people to challenge in federal court their unlawful detention by the government.
Local immigration lawyers had started creating habeas templates to make filing quicker. Khanbabai retrieved one from the cloud, and got to work.
At 10:01 p.m., she uploaded the document to US District Court for Massachusetts. She had already alerted the emergency clerk in Boston that it was coming.
At 10:55, a federal judge ruled that Öztürk must not be taken from Massachusetts without at least 48 hours’ advance notice to the court. Neither the judge nor Khanbabai knew it, but Öztürk had already been out of state for hours.
As Khanbabai worked into the night, she had so many unanswered questions about the client she’d never met. Friends said Öztürk was not active in campus protests, so why was she arrested? What’s happening to this country?
Trying to locate Öztürk, Khanbabai checked the online ICE detention locator maybe a dozen times. It offered no information about Öztürk‘s whereabouts. She called the ICE office in Burlington, Mass., multiple times. No response.
After learning that Öztürk had asthma, Khanbabai started cold-calling hospitals. She was not a patient anywhere. At least that was somewhat of a relief.
But if she wasn’t in a hospital, where was she?
Inside the ICE vehicle, Öztürk asked the officers: Am I safe?
One seemed conflicted. “We are not monsters,” he said. “We do what the government tells us.”
Those arrested on immigration violations are usually taken for processing to the ICE field office in Burlington, immigration attorneys say, but the agents instead drove Öztürk north, and kept her on the move.
Fourteen minutes after stopping in Methuen, at 6:22 p.m., they were on the road again, heading for Lebanon, N.H. It was only there, at what seemed to be a police station, that Öztürk realized she was not being kidnapped, she later wrote in a court filing.
She had repeatedly asked if she could speak with a lawyer. Not yet, she was told. She eventually gave up asking.
Agents got on the road again. At 10:28 p.m., Öztürk arrived at ICE’s field office in St. Albans, Vt. Officials allowed her to grab a few numbers from her phone, which had been kept from her. She noticed she had been receiving calls and messages, but didn’t have time to read them. They made her take a DNA test.
She was locked into a cell, and often interrupted by men coming in and asking her questions. Was she a member of a terrorist organization? Did she want to apply for asylum?
That night, she didn’t sleep.
At about 4 a.m. the next day, officers drove her to the airport in Burlington, Vt., and led her onto an early-morning commercial flight. Two plainclothes officials guided her to a seat in the back, then sat beside her. Öztürk looked out the window.
In the Atlanta airport, her exhaustion finally took over. She tried to take deep breaths as she coughed and cried. It was an asthma attack. She asked for medication but was told there was nowhere to get it. She would have to wait until her final destination.
She heaved through sobs, breathing into her emergency inhaler. This was unlike the Rümeysa her friends knew, but in this moment her sense of hope wavered. Strangers all around her saw her distress, and yet they didn’t say anything. They kept going about their lives.
“Every breath felt like a struggle, and the emotional pain was even worse,” Öztürk recalled to the Globe in an email. “I felt invisible.”
Her next plane was bound for Alexandria, La., an airport that has seen more ICE deportation and transfer flights than any other in the country in the first six months of this year. In this time period, tens of thousands of detainees were reportedly taken through.
The airport, with its own 400-bed detention facility, is at the center of the Trump administration’s efforts to expel foreign nationals. Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons has said he wants that process to be as efficient as Amazon delivering packages, “but with human beings.”
The White House strategy to crack down on student protesters — and do it quickly — was in large part developed in early March, several weeks before Öztürk’s arrest. The details of the private meeting among high-ranking law enforcement officials, and of the plan to detain Öztürk, were later revealed in federal court filings and testimony.
The meeting was convened by the leaders of Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, which is part of ICE. It included a handful of men with long experience in criminal investigations and analysis, including Derek Gordon, who later became HSI acting director, and Peter Hatch, assistant director of HSI’s Office of Intelligence.
Hatch oversaw some 1,000 investigative analysts — the “nerds” of law enforcement, as he called them. What came out of the HSI discussion was a plan to deploy that army of nerds to scrutinize political protesters in the US.
To take on the task, they assembled what the administration internally called a “tiger team.” Hatch identified analysts from work in counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and cyber intelligence and reassigned them to investigate foreign students.
In an apparent nod to efficiency, leaders told Hatch to study the people listed by Canary Mission, the doxxing site. Most of the leads the analysts followed were simply taken off the group’s website, Hatch later testified, though he didn’t know who was behind the site and did not consider it an authoritative source of information. (Canary Mission did not respond to Globe interview requests.)
Starting with more than 5,000 names to investigate, the tiger team had soon generated an estimated 200 reports. One of them was for Öztürk.
An analyst noted her co-authorship of an op-ed in The Tufts Daily, which called on the school to support students’ pro-Palestinian resolutions, and that it cited a group called Tufts Students for Justice in Palestine. In October 2024, roughly six months after the op-ed was published, Tufts suspended the group for a number of alleged rule violations, including posting images of weapons and encouraging students to “escalate” at a protest.
A news story about the group’s suspension, published by the Globe-owned site Boston.com, was included in Öztürk’s dossier. The analyst also included two key files: the op-ed and the profile of her by Canary Mission. That was the extent of the evidence found against her, Trump administration officials later testified.
The skinny Öztürk report, plus a memo summarizing it, was sent up the bureaucracy, like a packing slip that needed to be stamped by multiple managers. The decision to revoke a visa was up to the State Department.
Eventually, it landed with John Armstrong, the most senior official in the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs. He’d been in the post less than a month but had 30 years of experience in the US government and foreign service, including stints in Romania, Poland, and Ukraine.
Armstrong had been in close contact with the White House. He frequently spoke with Trump adviser Stephen Miller, known as the architect of hard-line immigration policies.
Armstrong spent considerable time with Öztürk’s file. It struck him as a complicated case, according to his testimony in court.
The summary memo focused on the op-ed. “Öztürk has been involved with actions, protesting Tufts’ relationship with Israel,” the memo asserted. However, it went on, investigative agencies did not provide “any evidence showing that Öztürk has engaged in any antisemitic activity or made any public statements indicating support for a terrorist organization or antisemitism generally.”
Armstrong wrote his thoughts on the page: “actions not words.”
Öztürk’s words in the op-ed were not a “key factor” in revoking her visa, he’d testify. Instead, it was her implied association with Tufts Students for Justice in Palestine, the group that was mentioned in the op-ed and that Tufts later suspended.
It didn’t seem to matter that the op-ed was published six months before the suspension, or that Öztürk was not a member of Students for Justice in Palestine. As the Trump administration saw it, by supporting the same set of resolutions, Öztürk had “found common cause” with the group.
The memo went so far as to acknowledge that the government didn’t really have information that would “establish any potential [visa] ineligibility for Öztürk.” Still, the State Department could in its “discretion and in accordance with Department policy … approve revocation of her F-1 visa effective immediately based on the totality of the circumstances.”
That was good enough for Armstrong.
On March 21, Armstrong canceled Öztürk’s visa. The decision would need to stay quiet. “Due to ongoing ICE operational security, this revocation will be silent,” he wrote in a memo, “the Department of State will not notify the subject of the revocation.”
The orders to locate and arrest Öztürk came to Patrick Cunningham, a top official with the HSI office in Boston. Cunningham had to think about them. He couldn’t remember a time a visa revocation like this had come from so high up, with such high priority. And he had read the op-ed, but didn’t see anything in it suggesting Öztürk had committed a crime.
He decided he’d better check with an ICE lawyer.
“When you receive information from headquarters at this level, top down, you make the assumption that it’s legally sufficient,” Cunningham later testified. “But I did contact our legal counsel to ensure that we were on solid legal ground.”
Not long after, he signed the warrant for Öztürk’s arrest.
On the evening of March 25, Somerville police were talking to a neighbor outside Mike Mathis’s front door. The police were following up on 911 calls that a woman may have been kidnapped from the intersection out front.
Mathis had a home security camera pointed at that intersection, installed because people had hit parked cars in front of his place. He used his computer to check the video recording. Remarkably, it showed all of Öztürk’s arrest.
Oh my God, he thought as he watched, what is happening?
By the next morning, news was spreading that Öztürk had been arrested, but no one could find her. Khanbabai, after a short and fitful night of sleep, was chasing a government attorney on the case, trying to compel the government to release her location.
Friends were looking, too. “Selam Rumeysa!!” one in Boston messaged Öztürk over WhatsApp, “please reassure me you’re okay, I don’t want to believe this.” She received no reply.
At 10:31 a.m. that Wednesday, Anna Garson, a Tufts administrator in charge of overseeing some visa programs at the university, was cc’d on an email to Öztürk. The message, dated Tuesday, said Öztürk’s designation had been terminated in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System. SEVIS, as it’s known, is a central database maintained by ICE where universities input information about international students.
“... If you remain in the United States, you may be contacted by immigration officials,” it read. When that email was delivered to Öztürk, she had already been in ICE custody for about 17 hours.
Shaken by the security camera footage, Mathis decided to share it with the media and others. “There are literally masked people taking someone – like, that’s not normal, right?” he recalled. “My wife is an immigrant. She went to Tufts for her PhD … exact same situation,” he said. “It was terrifying.”
The video went viral, spreading around the world on social media, news sites, and on television.
In Turkey, the news of Öztürk’s detainment flashed on a TV screen seen by the country’s minister of national education, Yusuf Tekin.
There must be a mistake, a problem, this cannot be happening, Tekin thought.
The arrest conflicted with Tekin’s understanding of America “as a symbol and actor defending human dignity, democracy, and human rights,” he said in a Turkish-language interview with the Globe. “This incident turned many things upside down in my mind and left a lasting impression as a deeply shocking event.”
Tekin called a friend in the US to confirm it was true. He later took to social media to criticize the US government’s actions, calling it “unlawful” to detain Öztürk for speaking out for Palestinians. “Öztürk’s voice is the conscience of humanity,” he wrote.
As questions mounted that Wednesday afternoon about where Öztürk was — and why she was detained — DHS issued a statement, including to the Globe. It asserted that “DHS and ICE investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas. … Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated.” The statement offered no evidence Öztürk had engaged in such behavior.
That evening, about 2,000 protesters assembled in Somerville, near where Öztürk had been taken. They met at the base of the historic Old Powder House, where the British seized colonial gunpowder in 1774, an act that unified colonists in outrage in the months leading up to the American Revolution.
“Boston, New England, and the United States has always welcomed students and neighbors, and now to have this happen is just shocking,” said one protester.
“We need to call what happened to Rümeysa what it is: state-sanctioned political kidnapping,” said another.
Some 24 hours after being seized in Somerville, Öztürk arrived at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center. It was the evening of Wednesday, March 26.
The complex of warehouse-style buildings, surrounded by high chain-link fences topped with barbed wire, is on 25 acres in rural Basile. The facility, designated for women and designed to hold about 900 detainees, is run by publicly traded GEO Group, a prison company that in fiscal year 2024 reported $2.42 billion in revenue.
At about 9:45 p.m., Öztürk was finally — briefly — able to speak by phone to Khanbabai for the first time. “She was stunned ... traumatized by it all,” the immigration attorney recalled.
Öztürk was assigned to a cell with about 23 other women — a sign said the room capacity was 14 — with blue metal bunk beds stacked tightly. The women came from all over the world: El Salvador, Russia, Colombia, Armenia, Brazil, China. Among them were mothers, a teacher, an artist, a pilates instructor, a human rights activist; they had been in the US for anywhere from a short time to over a decade.
The languages the women spoke were different, but the sounds of their sobs became universal. “The space felt like it was constantly crying,” Öztürk recalled to the Globe. “I heard women weeping everywhere — medical lines, dorms, on the phone, [in the] dining hall.”
Early on, Öztürk experienced her second asthma attack since being detained, according to court documents. She stood in a hallway, weeping, for 10 or 15 minutes before she was taken to the medical center. She said a nurse, preparing to take her temperature, looked at her hijab — “you need to take that thing off your head,” the nurse said, tearing it off.
“The allegations about Ms. Ozturk’s detainment are unequivocally false,” a senior DHS official said in a statement to the Globe. The agency provides “comprehensive medical care from the moment an alien enters ICE custody,” the official continued. “The facility has no record of any nurses or staff members telling Ozturk to remove her hijab.”
Öztürk tried to keep connected to her loved ones in the US through a messaging app used by the detention center, though it only worked sporadically. Reyyan Bilge, Öztürk’s former professor in Istanbul and now at Northeastern, became a bridge to her family in Turkey.
In the early days, Öztürk seemed downtrodden to her loved ones. “I wouldn’t say broken, but kind of broken-hearted,” Öztürk’s father said, according to Bilge.
But in time, the women around Öztürk began to renew her sense of hope. Other detainees offered her two of her favorite things: tea and a book: Eleanor H. Porter’s ”Pollyanna.“ It is the story of a girl, an orphan, who despite having lost everything, manages to somehow remain full of optimism.
In the weeks that followed, the fight to free Öztürk took place in protests and in the courts.
Demonstrations were held outside Boston City Hall and in front of the federal courthouse in the Seaport. Supporters displayed a “Free Rümeysa” banner at a New England Revolution game. In New York, people rallied outside the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse, holding pictures of her.
Many asked, What had been her crime? And many wondered: If this happened to Rümeysa, could it happen to any of us?
Over time, Öztürk and her legal team would find themselves fighting several legal battles — in immigration court and in federal court — in ways that often overlapped. The immigration case is over whether the government can deport Öztürk; the federal cases are about the legality of revoking her SEVIS record and, in her habeas case, whether her arrest and detention were unlawful.
In a separate case, Öztürk wasn’t a plaintiff, but the treatment of her, Khalil, and other detained scholars was the central focus. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) alleged in federal court in Boston that the Trump administration had implemented an “ideological deportation” policy, punishing foreign students who had exercised free speech and chilling future dissent from others.
By the beginning of May, about 20 lawyers had signed on alongside Khanbabai to represent Öztürk in court. They included Jessie Rossman, the legal director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, who led the habeas case based in Vermont, where it had been transferred after Khanbabai’s initial filing in Massachusetts.
Rossman was a sharp, formidable opponent in the courtroom. A graduate of Yale and Harvard Law School, she spoke quickly and definitively, captivating audiences at Öztürk’s hearings.
Rossman told the Globe that the right to habeas corpus is central to the Constitution.
It is “one of the foundational components of our democracy in this country,” she said. “If you don’t have that as a primary right, then everything else falls by the wayside.”
Inside the detention center, Öztürk settled into a sort of hazy routine, buoyed by the community of women around her.
They held ad-hoc exercise classes inside their crowded cell. They did each others’ hair and worked on art projects with whatever supplies they could get.
At times, it took 18 hours to get the toilet paper she and the other women requested. After getting writing paper and pens, she was able to work on her dissertation proposal mailed by her Tufts thesis adviser, Sara Johnson. (“The feedback she included felt like a treasure,” Öztürk said.)
She also noticed the ways the women around her were suffering and began recording what she saw and heard, taking careful notes. She listened intently to stories from “cancer patients, diabetics, and others who told me that they had their medical needs denied,” she said. And she watched as the women experienced physical and mental health crises: panic attacks, pregnancy complications, and nearly fainting in line as they waited for medication in the Louisiana heat.
“Though studying human and child development exposed me to human pain in various settings before, I’d never seen such overwhelming, preventable suffering,” Öztürk told the Globe. “To this day, I sometimes wake up in tears for friends still there.”
On April 22, when Öztürk had been in detention for almost a month, she and other detainees had an opportunity to share their stories with a contingent of representatives from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Massachusetts, including Representatives Ayanna Pressley and Jim McGovern and Senator Ed Markey.
As the three detainees waited for the group to arrive, Öztürk began to ask the women questions. Where were they from? Why had they been detained? One was Wendy Brito, an asylum-seeker and mother of three from El Salvador who had been in the US for more than 15 years. Next to her was a woman who was pregnant. A guard told them to stop talking.
When the congressional members came in, Öztürk stood up, grinning, and hugged them. She had brought the notes she had been taking.
She told the lawmakers about how she and other women fought to get adequate care and medication and about the lack of proper nutrition for the women inside. In a way, she brought those women into the room with her.
“Even being in her position, she took her time to try and help others,” Brito recalled in Spanish.
Öztürk helped inspire the legislators to write their own op-ed, calling for her release and for an investigation into conditions in the detention center. ICE responded, saying in a statement it “rejects the false narrative that individuals in our custody are denied access to adequate medical care or nutritious food.”
“Such claims are misleading” and “undermine public trust,” it said.
As the time with the representatives concluded and they were leaving, Öztürk had a request.
Would you pray for us? she asked Pressley. I’m afraid that something will happen to me. And no one will even know.
In early May, reminders of Öztürk’s arrest were scattered across the conference of the Society for Research in Child Development in Minnesota.
Öztürk had planned to be there to present some of her latest research. She would also reunite with Fatima Tuba Yaylacı, a former professor of Öztürk’s in Turkey and a graduate of the University of Minnesota. Neither woman was there.
Öztürk was going on more than five weeks in detention. Yaylacı had stayed in Turkey, afraid that it wasn’t safe to travel to the US.
On a bulletin board, conference attendees pinned up notes of encouragement for Öztürk.
“We are with you.”
“We miss you.”
“In solidarity we won’t stop fighting.”
On May 8, the district court in Vermont decided that Öztürk’s bail hearing the next day could be held remotely. The proceedings would take place in the courtroom of US District Judge William K. Sessions III, while Öztürk would appear on a video link from inside detention.
Khanbabai hurriedly packed two bags — one with clothes for her client — and rushed to Logan to make a flight to New Orleans, then rented a car to drive the three hours west to Basile. Around 7:30 the next morning, she left her motel and drove to the facility.
The rain barely let up that Friday, and crawfish dragged themselves through the puddles and mud. Khanbabai was cautiously hopeful Öztürk would be set free on bail. She wore long silver earrings, each with a line in Persian from an Iranian poet. “Slowly spring arrives, soft and gentle,” one said. “These are happy days,” read the other.
Outside the facility, about a dozen people had gathered to show support for Öztürk — they’d come from New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Houston. Shayane Caballero had driven about three hours from Texas, where she was a college student, to back Öztürk. She wanted to make sure ”Rümeysa knows that the world is out here.”
More than 100 miles away, in another Louisiana ICE center, Khalil was on a call with his lawyers when Öztürk’s hearing started. They paused their meeting to listen to the livestream. Khalil was keenly interested in a growing number of cases similar to his.
Öztürk finally appeared on the screen wearing an orange jumpsuit. In the Vermont courtroom, people gasped, then fell silent. The only sound was the scratch of the sketch artist’s chalk on a sheet of cardboard.
Öztürk listened to the proceedings like the scholar she was, taking notes as witnesses spoke in Vermont. Johnson, her PhD thesis adviser from Tufts, testified about her academic work and how crucial it was for her to return to campus. A doctor and asthma expert from Massachusetts General Hospital described the risks to Öztürk’s health if her detention continued.
Rossman, Öztürk’s ACLU lawyer, focused on free speech and lack of due process in her arrest. “The clear message that the government is sending to everyone who is watching is that you can be detained thousands of miles from your home for more than six weeks for writing a single student newspaper article,” she said.
Michael P. Drescher, first assistant US attorney for Vermont, centered the government’s argument on jurisdictional grounds. “We continue to assert that this court is neither the right forum nor is this the right time for hearing this habeas claim,” he said.
After hours of testimony, Judge Sessions took over. As he began speaking, the direction of his ruling became clear.
“Her continued detention potentially chills the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens,” Sessions said. “I do find, frankly, that these are very substantial claims of both due process and First Amendment violations.”
He ruled she should be set free on bail — immediately.
Öztürk and Khanbabai stood up and hugged.
Following along with the hearing from detention, Khalil’s eyes filled with tears, he recalled. He felt relieved for Öztürk and optimistic that he, too, would ultimately be released. That would be up to the courts.
Outside the ICE facility in Basile, the demonstrators waited in the rain for Öztürk to emerge. The work of the detention center, a cog in the country’s fast-moving deportation machinery, continued.
Guards hustled some two dozen women in gray sweat suits outside and onto a white bus. The women locked eyes with the demonstrators, a number of them waved.
“¿Para dónde las llevan?” a protester tried to ask. Where were they being taken? No answer was given.
The protesters watched some of the women bang their palms on the bus windows, as the driver pulled away, shuttling them to an unknown location.
At about 5:15 p.m., Öztürk finally walked out of the center alongside Khanbabai. She wore the light pink blouse and other clothes her lawyer had brought from Boston. She walked directly toward the group. “Thank you for all the care and love,” she said.
The next day, a group of friends and colleagues had gathered at Logan to welcome Öztürk back. Her thesis adviser, Johnson, came from Tufts. Markey and Pressley were there.
Her friend Gulay Kaplan had driven more than 10 hours from Washington, D.C., to meet Öztürk. The friends went far back, to their days volunteering with Syrian refugee children in Istanbul. Kaplan had thought often over the past six weeks about how what had happened to her friend could easily happen to her.
But for some moments, in a private room at Logan, they were all simply able to be together. “I’m still processing that this is real. This is happening. She’s here,” Kaplan said.
Then Öztürk came out of the room to the flashes and clicks of cameras, to speak to the assembled journalists. How would she address the ordeal she had gone through, knowing the world would be watching?
Hers was a message of hope.
“America is the greatest democracy in the world, and I believe in those values that we share,” Öztürk said. “I have faith in the American system of justice.”
The United States, the land of free speech and exceptional universities, has always been a draw for international students. But as they watched Khalil, Öztürk, and others jailed for activism, many started to look over their shoulders.
In Massachusetts, foreign students were advised to take their immigration paperwork with them at all times. Some memorized the phone numbers of friends and coached them about how to help in case they were arrested. Others asked their school newspapers to retract their names from any articles they had written, or even been quoted in.
An Iranian doctoral student in Alabama decided to self-deport this spring, after more than 40 days in detention. He had traffic citations on his record; the Trump administration called him a “significant” national security risk. “I love this country, but they don’t want me here so I will go home,” he reportedly told his lawyer.
“This is not a place to live,” said his fiancee. “This is not the freedom and American dream that they always talk about.”
This summer, noncitizen university professors took the stand in Boston during the AAUP trial before Senior District Judge William G. Young, testifying to how they and their international students self-censored and lived in fear.
A professor at Brown was too intimidated to publish an article critical of the Israeli government, in case it exposed her to deportation. A philosophy professor at Harvard stopped attending protests and canceled overseas trips. A Barnard professor, a US citizen, said international students she knew had been scared into silence.
“In some ways the Trump administration has already won,” said Evelyn Douek, a Stanford Law School professor. “Even if the administration ultimately loses in court, I think that it has won in meaningful ways through all the things that are currently being left unsaid, being left unwritten, by noncitizens.”
Watching from overseas, students who otherwise would have continued their education in the US began to make other plans.
In August 2023, according to federal data, nearly 400,000 students on visas entered the US from abroad. That number represented nearly a full recovery after the drop from the COVID pandemic. By the fall of 2025, after the Trump administration’s crackdown, the number of new international students coming to the US dropped by about 17 percent, according to early data.
In another time, Nazlı and Arya Efteyla, both 15, would have been the kind of Turkish students who would come to the US for college. Hailing from some of Istanbul’s elite high schools, they started English lessons at ages 4 and 5. Nazli is in advanced placement courses and is planning to take the SAT.
Nazli is excited about an upcoming school trip to Boston, including a tour of the Harvard campus. And yet the teens, who asked to not use their last names, no longer see themselves applying to Harvard, or anywhere else in the US.
“My mom wouldn’t let me,” Arya Efteyla said. “Because the US is a pretty dangerous country for us, we’re still pretty scared of it.”
As the girls sat in Istanbul’s Maçka Park in September, they recited a litany of news items from America. Scary arrests of students protesting the war in Gaza. ICE arrests of foreigners with valid residency papers, especially Öztürk, whose case hits particularly close to home.
Then there are the acts of violence, they said, including a young Ukrainian refugee stabbed to death on a train, and the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk while speaking on a college campus.
“Risking your life to stay there, to get your education from there, to work there,” Nazlı said, “I don’t think it’s worth it.”
When Öztürk was released from detention, she returned as best she could to life as a Tufts student.
She’s had to do a lot of thinking. Before her arrest, she had the rest of her academic year largely mapped out, as she explained in court filings. She would likely collaborate with Johnson on a project involving a nonfiction podcast for young people. She would also lead a children’s media class for high school students and, she had hoped, work as a teaching assistant. She had expected to defend her dissertation by November.
The Trump administration took much of that away.
When ICE terminated Öztürk’s record in the SEVIS system, it also stripped away her right to legally work in the United States, preventing her from being paid to teach or conduct research.
“I had never before felt discouraged about my education until my detention on March 25,” Öztürk said in an October court filing. Being barred from work and educational opportunities, she said, has “compounded the sense of loss and injustice that I feel.”
She’s surrounded herself with her friends and professors, who enveloped her with care. Her colleagues made Öztürk feel like she belonged. “It is their kindness and understanding that have been helping me navigate through this incredibly challenging time,” she told the Globe.
She has a hypoallergenic white cat named Hayal — a Turkish word meaning “dream” or “imagination” — and she still smiles often. She’s still quick to ask others how they are, and still tries to help where she can. This summer, she published an essay in Vanity Fair, also printed as an op-ed in The Tufts Daily, using her experience in detention to call attention to the mistreatment of the other women held there.
She worked constantly on her dissertation, trying to make up for lost time. The demands of the several ongoing court cases were also extensive.
Judge Young, appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan, issued his ruling in AAUP v. Rubio in September. The case was “perhaps the most important ever to fall within the jurisdiction of this district court,” Young wrote.
In a scathing 161-page decision, he said the Trump administration had chilled the First Amendment rights of the plaintiffs by targeting noncitizen academics for pro-Palestinian speech. At the core of the case was the question of “whether non-citizens lawfully present here in [the] United States actually have the same free speech rights as the rest of us,” Young wrote. “The Court answers this Constitutional question unequivocally ‘yes, they do.’ ”
The Trump administration intends to fight Young’s decision. “The District Court erred because aliens do not have the same First Amendment rights as US citizens, we anticipate this will be overturned on appeal,” a spokesperson for the State Department told the Globe in November. “The State Department will protect Americans from aliens who put the safety of our citizens at risk and who openly support terrorism.”
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is still trying to deport Öztürk. “A U.S. visa is a privilege not a right,” the spokesperson said. “The United States is under no obligation to allow foreign aliens to come to our country, commit acts of anti-American, pro-terrorist, antisemitic hate, or to incite violence.”
In an appeals court hearing in September about a transfer order related to Öztürk’s habeas corpus case, the government suggested it could detain her again if given the chance. On Dec. 8, a federal judge in Boston ordered the government to restore her SEVIS record.
Öztürk remains “optimistic about the American judicial system,” she told the Globe. Still, the traumatic experiences the US government put her through are now part of the American chapter of her story, and can’t be unwritten.
“I have spent nearly seven years in the United States, a formative period that has significantly shaped my young adulthood,” Öztürk said. “However, I have also faced deeply troubling and dehumanizing experiences.”
Öztürk’s legal team recently amended her immigration court filing, to include the option for her to voluntarily leave the US. If she left, it could help her one day return.
She has often thought back to that day in the Atlanta airport, struggling to breathe, her cries audible to the people around her. She thinks about how strangers in the airport saw her in pain, but then turned away.
“I wanted to scream for help, but I noticed it wouldn’t matter,” Öztürk said.
“That moment broke something inside me.”
Samantha J. Gross, Jazmin Aguilera, and Camilo Fonseca of the Globe staff contributed reporting.
Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio can be reached at giulia.mcdnr@globe.com. Follow her @giuliamcdnr. Mark Arsenault can be reached at mark.arsenault@globe.com. Follow him @bostonglobemark.