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With a line of cars waiting behind them at the train station, the two women hugged tightly as they said goodbye at the end of a spring break that hadn’t turned out to be the relaxing vacation they’d imagined.
Their girls trip had transformed into endless conversations about security precautions as one of the friends, 30-year-old Turkish national Rümeysa Öztürk, grew increasingly worried she would become a target of the Trump administration’s deportation campaign.
Öztürk, a former Fulbright scholar in a doctoral program at Tufts University, was stunned to find out in early March that she had been targeted by a pro-Israel group that highlighted an op-ed she co-wrote last year criticizing the school’s response to the war in Gaza.
Her concern deepened days later with the detention of former Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent resident the government is trying to deport over his role in pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus.
By the time of Öztürk’s spring break trip on March 15, she was consumed with anxiety, said her friend E., an Arab American academic on the East Coast who asked to withhold her name and other identifying details for security reasons.
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.”
By now, much of the country has seen the footage of Oztürk’s capture.
Surveillance video from March 25 shows her walking to dinner in Somerville, Massachusetts, near the Tufts campus, chatting on the phone with her mother when she is swarmed by six masked plainclothes officers. Öztürk screams.
Within three minutes, she’s bundled into an unmarked car and whisked away, a jarring scene that showed the nation what President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign looks like on the street level: federal agents ambushing a Muslim woman who co-wrote an op-ed in a college newspaper.
The footage drew worldwide outrage and turned Öztürk into a powerful symbol of the Department of Homeland Security dragnet.
Surveillance Video of Rümeysa Öztürk’s Capture
Credit:
Obtained by ProPublica
To piece together what’s happened since then, ProPublica examined court filings and interviewed attorneys and Öztürk’s close friend, who regularly speaks to her in detention. What emerges is a more intimate picture of Öztürk and how a child development researcher charged with no crime ended up in a crowded cell in Louisiana. The interviews and court records also provide a glimpse into a sprawling, opaque apparatus designed to deport the maximum number of people with minimum accountability.
Her lawyers describe it as the story of a Trump-era rendition, a callback to the post-9/11 practice of federal agents grabbing Muslim suspects off the street and taking them to locations known for harsh conditions and shoddy oversight.
Öztürk is among nearly 1,000 students whose visas have been revoked, according to a tally by the Association of International Educators. And she is among several students and professors who have been detained.
Her detention was exceptional, immigration attorneys said, because it was caught on camera. What’s scariest, they say, is how fast the removals happen and how little is known about them.
Homeland Security spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment.
The video of Öztürk’s arrest surfaced because Boston-area activists had set up a hotline for locals to report interactions with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The call that came in about Öztürk reported a “kidnapping,” said Fatema Ahmad of the Muslim Justice League, part of the advocacy network that obtained the footage.
“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,” she said, referring to a recent six-day ICE operation.
After her arrest, Öztürk was held by ICE incommunicado for nearly 24 hours, her attorneys said, during which time she suffered the first of four asthma attacks.
Only later, through court filings and conversations with Öztürk, her attorneys learned that in the course of a single night she was taken from Massachusetts to New Hampshire and then Vermont, where the next morning, she was loaded onto a plane and flown to an ICE outpost in Alexandria, Louisiana.
Her last stop 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.
ICE officials say in court documents they couldn’t find a bed for Öztürk in New England, adding that out-of-state transfers are “routinely conducted after arrest, due to operational necessity.”
Immigration attorneys say the late-night hopscotch was an ICE tactic to complicate jurisdiction and thwart legal attempts to stop Öztürk’s removal. Louisiana and Texas, they say, are favored destinations because the courts there are viewed as friendlier to the Trump administration’s MAGA agenda, issuing decisions limiting migrant rights.
“It was like a relay race, and she was the baton,” Öztürk’s attorney Mahsa Khanbabai said.
“Whole Other Level of Terror” On March 4, two weeks before their spring break reunion, Öztürk texted her friend E. to say she’d been “doxxed” by Canary Mission, part of an array of shadowy, right-wing Jewish groups that are criticized for using cherry-picked statements and distorted context to portray even mild criticism of Israel as antisemitism or support for terrorism.
For more than a decade, hard-line pro-Israel groups have publicized the names of pro-Palestinian activists, academics and students, often with scant or dubious “evidence” to back allegations of anti-Jewish bigotry. The goal, civil liberties advocates say, is to silence protesters through campaigns that have cost targets jobs and led to death threats. On its website, Canary Mission said it is “motivated by a desire to combat” antisemitism on college campuses. It says it investigates individuals and groups “across the North American political spectrum, including the far-right, far-left and anti-Israel activists.”
The effort was stepped up during the wave of student protests that erupted in opposition to the war in Gaza.
Öztürk’s entry on the Canary Mission site, posted in February, claims she “engaged in anti-Israel activism in 2024,” citing the op-ed she co-wrote more than a year ago that accused Tufts of ignoring students’ calls to divest from companies with ties to Israel over human rights concerns.
“I can not believe how much time people have,” Öztürk texted her friend when she saw the post.
E. responded with an open-mouthed “shocked” emoji. The Canary Mission entry, she said, had unlocked “a whole other level of terror” for Öztürk.
“It was that feeling of having your privacy be so violated — for people to spend all this time and energy on one op-ed,” E. said.
The op-ed published in The Tufts Daily was signed by four authors, including Öztürk, and endorsed by more than 30 other unnamed students. The language echoed the statements of United Nations officials and international war crimes investigators about the death toll in Gaza, which according to health officials there has passed 50,000, with about a third of the casualties under 18.
Öztürk, an advocate for children in communities plagued by violence, was personally heartsick over images of burned and mangled Palestinian children. But she was not a prominent activist or a fixture at campus protests, her friends and attorneys say.
Öztürk’s attorneys, who are scheduled to appear Monday before a federal judge in Vermont, say the sole basis for revoking her visa appears to be the op-ed highlighted by Canary Mission.
Ramzi Kassem, a lawyer representing Öztürk, said pro-Israel groups are providing the administration with lists of targets for its deportation campaign against noncitizen student protesters. “The sequence of events,” he said, “is op-ed, doxxing, detention.”
Pro-Israel groups, including Canary Mission, have boasted about their influence on the Trump administration’s targeting of student protesters. Immigration officials insist that they make their own removal decisions based on a number of factors, including a hard line on criticism of Israel.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he has revoked more than 300 student visas, including for Khalil and Öztürk, under the Immigration and Nationality Act, which permits the deportation of noncitizens who are deemed “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests” of the United States.
“We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist who tears up our university campuses,” Rubio told a news conference last month in response to a question about Öztürk’s detention. “Every day I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.”
A spokesperson said the State Department does not comment on ongoing litigation.
In a call with reporters on Thursday, attorney Marc Van Der Hout of Khalil’s legal team said the authority Rubio cites was intended for rare occasions involving high-level diplomatic matters, “not to be used to go after people for First Amendment-protected activity.”
Overnight Odyssey Surrounded by masked officers on March 25, Öztürk had no idea who was seizing her or where she was being taken, according to a statement filed on Thursday in federal court. The operatives were dressed in civilian clothes, she wrote, so at first she worried they were vigilantes spurred by Canary Mission.
“I had never seen police approach and take someone away like this,” she wrote. “I thought they were people who had doxxed me and I was afraid for my safety.”
Öztürk’s statement details her harrowing night being shuttled across New England with little food after a day of fasting for Ramadan. She describes being shackled by her feet and stomach and then driven to different sites for meetings with unidentified men, some in uniform and some not. One group so unsettled her, Öztürk wrote, that she “was sure they were going to kill me.”
At another stop, described in the statement as an isolated parking lot, Öztürk repeatedly asked an officer if she was in physical danger.
“He seemed to feel guilty and said ‘we are not monsters,’” Öztürk wrote.
At the last stop in Vermont, Öztürk wrote, she arrived famished and with “a lot of motion sickness from all the driving.” Officers took her biometric data and a DNA sample.
She would stay there for the night, in a cell with just a hard bench and a toilet. Officers gained access to her cellphone, she wrote, including personal photos of her without her religious headscarf.
“During the night they came to my cell multiple times and asked me questions about wanting to apply for asylum and if I was a member of a terrorist organization,” Öztürk wrote. “I tried to be helpful and answer their questions but I was so tired and didn’t understand what was happening to me.”
Around 4 the next morning, she wrote, she was shackled again in preparation for a trip to the airport. She was told the destination was Louisiana. Her statement to the court recounts the parting words of one of her jailers: “I hope we treated you with respect.”
At nearly every stage of her detention, Öztürk, who takes daily preventative medication for asthma, experienced asthma attacks, which she says are triggered by fumes, mold or stress, court files say.
During one in Louisiana, Öztürk wrote, a nurse took her temperature and said, “You need to take that thing off your head,” before removing her hijab without asking. When Öztürk protested, the nurse told her, “This is for your health.”
By her fourth wheezing episode, Öztürk wrote, she didn’t bother to seek attention from her jailers in Louisiana: “I didn’t feel safe at the medical center.”
After the portrait Öztürk paints of ICE detention, her statement turns back to her old life, a reminder of how abruptly her world has shifted. From her cell in Louisiana, she described the plans she had in the coming months. Completing her dissertation. A conference in Minnesota. Students to mentor. A summer class to teach.
“I want to return to Tufts to resume all of my cherished work,” she concluded.
Reunion Interrupted Öztürk and E. bonded in 2018 after meeting at a Muslim study group in New York, where they were both attending Columbia University.
They were in their 20s then, two bookish cat lovers who were serious about their studies and their faith. They went on nature walks and liked afternoon naps.
“Old ladies,” E. said with a laugh.
They remained close and took turns visiting after Öztürk left for Tufts and E. moved away from the city. Over the years, the pressures of grad school and distance had made their visits less frequent, E. said, so they’d been looking forward to their three-day spring break catch-up.
During the visit, E. said, the women broke their fast together and visited a mosque for late-night Ramadan prayers. They stopped by a children’s library Öztürk wanted to visit. They stayed up late talking, gaming out how to keep Öztürk safe from the Trump administration’s crackdown.
“She said, ‘I think this is going to be the last time I get to visit you,’” E. recalled. “I told her, ‘No, no, you’re going to be able to come again, don’t worry, and I’m going to come visit you.’ That all turned out to be wrong.”
The friends had kept in touch daily after parting at the train station. They exchanged mundane texts and voice notes about doing taxes and eating cookies. E. sent Öztürk a photo of the park where they had walked during their visit. “Rümeysa! The trees are starting to bloom again,” she wrote.
They last texted on March 25, a couple hours before Öztürk was detained on the way to dinner in Somerville.
E. didn’t find out what happened until the next morning, when she stumbled out of bed before dawn for the early meal Muslims eat before the daily Ramadan fast. Sipping her tea, E. scrolled through her phone and spotted a message that said, “Have you seen this?” alongside an alert about Öztürk’s arrest.
“It was like: ‘Is this real? Am I still asleep?’” she recalled.
E. said the idea of her gentle friend being swept into ICE custody still didn’t seem real until later that morning, when the video was released and she saw a familiar figure, in the same white jacket she’d worn on her visit.
“It was utterly nauseating to watch,” E. said. “So horrifying and so heartbreaking to see her have to be so violently taken that way.”
E. and Öztürk
Credit:
Courtesy of E.
Trying to Be a “Good Detainee” Two days after Öztürk’s transfer to Louisiana, E. received a call from a strange number that came up on her phone as “Prison/Jail.” It was Öztürk, in the first of what would become regular check-ins at random times of the day.
In interviews, E. showed ProPublica corroborating photos, text messages and voice notes of her interactions with her friend.
“She always starts with, ‘Is this a good time to talk?’ And I’m, like, ‘I’ve been waiting for this,’” E. said.
Some days, Öztürk sounds upbeat. Turkish diplomats, she told E., had delivered her a new hijab. Öztürk found a cookbook and noted a citrus salad recipe she might try someday. She cracked jokes about being too old to climb into a bunk bed every night.
In one call, Öztürk expressed relief that she’d filed her taxes before getting detained — a perfect example, E. said, of her overachieving friend’s wry sense of humor.
“She read the detainee handbook two times,” E. said. “She said, ‘I’m trying to be a good detainee.’”
Other calls are not as easy, E. said, adding that she didn’t want to divulge specifics out of respect for her friend’s privacy. In those harder talks, E. said, she wishes she could “be there to tell her it’ll be OK, give her a hug.”
Their conversations are sprinkled with reminders that Öztürk’s nightmare might not end soon. She asked for help canceling appointments and returning library books. She’s also in the process of requesting a single paperback, per detention regulations.
If approved, she wants E. to find her a guide for writing children’s literature, preferably with exercises she could do from her cell. E. said her heart ached when Öztürk asked her to make the book a long one.
The calls and tasks ease feelings of helplessness, E. said, an antidote for the guilt that sneaks up on her when she walks outside on a sunny day.
“How is it that we’re moving forward,” she said, “while my closest friend is rotting in this place?”
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