“So horrifying and so heartbreaking”: Öztürk’s close friend provides an intimate look into one of the hundreds of foreign students who have had their visas revoked — and in dozens of instances have been detained without criminal charges.

Reporting Highlights

  • Odyssey: Rümeysa Öztürk’s arrest and detention reveal what President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign looks like on the street level.
  • Rendition: Immigration lawyers describe the case as a callback to the post-9/11 practice of federal agents grabbing Muslim suspects off the street.
  • Process: Öztürk was shipped from state to state — a journey, critics say, that makes legal challenges of such cases more difficult.
  • StopTouchingYourPhone@lemmy.world
    5·
    6 days ago

    During their reunion in E.’s hometown, the first time they’d been together since the summer, the friends looked up know-your-rights tutorials and discussed whether Öztürk should cut short her doctoral program. They spent their last day together filling out intake forms for legal aid groups — just in case.

    Right up until their last minutes together at the train station, they wrestled with how cautious Öztürk should be when she returned to Massachusetts. Öztürk wondered if she should avoid communal dinners, a feature of Muslim social life during the holy month of Ramadan.

    “I told her to keep going out, to be with her community. I wanted her to live her life,” E. recalled, her voice breaking.

    “And then she got abducted in broad daylight.”

    …

    “What broke me was her screaming. And knowing that the same thing had just happened to almost 400 people in the Boston area the week before,” said [Fatema Ahmad of the Muslim Justice League], referring to a recent six-day ICE operation.

    …

    Her last stop [after they moved her over 4 states in one night] was a detention center in Basile about an hour away, where she remains, one of two dozen women in a damp, mouse-infested cell built to hold 14, according to court filings.

    Whole thing’s a fucking brutal read, but worth it.