On Tuesday night, a Tufts University graduate student named Rumeysa Ozturk was detained by agents from the Department Of Homeland Security while walking down the sidewalk outside an off-campus apartment building. Ozturk, a Turkish citizen, is attending Tufts on a student visa.
Ozturk, who according to records from Immigration and Customs Enforcement is now being held in a detention facility in Louisiana, is now threatened with deportation despite not having been charged with any crime. When asked to explain why Ozturk was arrested and renditioned to another state, the DHS circulated the following statement:
Rumeysa Ozturk is a Turkish national and Tufts University graduate student, granted the privilege to be in this country on a visa. DHS and ICE investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes in the killing of Americans. A visa is a privilege not a right. Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated. This is commonsense security.
As far as anyone can tell, what the government is defining as "activities in support of Hamas" is Ozturk co-authoring an op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper that demanded the university "acknowledge the Palestinian genocide" and divest itself from Israel. As with Mahmoud Khalil, Ozturk is now in danger of being deported from the country for engaging in speech acts.
That is one way to understand what is happening to Ozturk. Another is to watch surveillance footage of her arrest:
Whereas the footage of Khalil's arrest, shot from the perspective of his pregnant wife, begins after he has already been put in handcuffs, this clip provides a fuller picture of what ICE agents actually do. There are differences that tell a story about what direction this is all going: A student who signed her name to an op-ed is now as much a target as the outspoken public activist; the condescending arresting officer wearing an Avengers T-shirt has given way to masked agents executing a choreographed snatch and grab.
A specific vocabulary has started to cohere around these incidents. Those wishing to accurately describe what's happening reach for appropriately severe words like "kidnapping," "political prisoner," and "disappeared." Others plan to just keep saying "terrorist" and "Hamas" and "privilege not a right," until they can redefine every visa and green-card holder in this country as a member of a sleeper cell.
The danger rests with those who are tempted to find some footing in the space that exists between these vocabularies. If this country is to go on breaking, to go on becoming a darker, more repressive place than it was the day before, it will be shepherded in that direction by everyone who insists on equivocating. This has already happened, and will continue to happen for as long as it is allowed to. Every second spent debating whether or not the Immigration and Nationality Act is being properly deployed is a second wasted.
Words ultimately can't obscure the image, though. The administration will make its arguments in hateful speeches and deranged statements and flimsy legal motions while the equivocators murmur. Eventually, one last court will decide if this is a country that allows for political disappearances, and then the administration will decide if this is a country that still heeds the courts. Throughout this whole process, the plain truth told by the images will never change: A woman who committed no crime was walking down the sidewalk in America. Masked plainclothes officers ambushed her from multiple directions. She screamed and recoiled as they grabbed at her wrists. She was handcuffed and taken away.
It can be hard to describe or visualize exactly what kind of country you want to live in, but it is not so hard to recognize the one you don't.
