At around 5:15 pm on Tuesday, a man in a black hoodie stopped Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk on the street in Somerville, Massachusetts. She tried to walk by, but he grabbed her. She screamed, and it seemed like help was arriving.
But the masked newcomers were actually there to help her assailant. They took off Ozturk’s backpack and seized her cellphone. The hooded man put her in handcuffs. “We’re the police,” they told her.
“You don’t look like it,” an apparent bystander replied. “Why are you hiding your faces?”
Ozturk, a Turkish national on a student visa, is currently being held in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center in Louisiana — despite a court order that she must remain in Massachusetts. The State Department has canceled Ozturk’s visa; ICE is preparing her deportation.
The Trump administration claims she has engaged in “pro-Hamas” activity, but they have provided no evidence of material support for Palestinian militants (or any other terrorist group). The closest thing anyone has found is a 2024 op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper, in which Ozturk and her coauthors criticize Israel’s war in Gaza but do not express anything that even approximates support for Hamas.
This troubling theory — that Ozturk was punished purely for her political speech — received more support during a Thursday afternoon press conference, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that his agency revoked Ozturk’s visa because she was part of a pro-Palestinian movement that caused “a ruckus” on campus.
“We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses,” he said, while providing no evidence that Ozturk had done anything more disruptive than penning an op-ed. He also suggested he had revoked the visas of “more than 300” students like her on similar grounds.
This is a clarifying moment for American democracy. Unmarked and unidentified law enforcement abducting a lawful migrant, seemingly in retaliation for First Amendment-protected speech, is the sort of attack on civil liberties that we would not hesitate to label as authoritarian in another country.
And it is only one example among many.
The targeting of at least seven other pro-Palestinian students, the rendering of hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to a Salvadoran prison camp, and the extended detention and physical abuse of lawful migrants at the border — all of these represent extraordinary abuses of federal power, targeting groups whose citizenship status gives them limited legal recourse.
Long-held fears about the weaponization of the US government against dissenters are thus no longer hypothetical. What’s happening is the full-spectrum application of federal immigration powers for authoritarian ends. And things are likely to get worse from here.
Immigration enforcement as an authoritarian gateway drug
On Wednesday night, Mother Jones published a story about how the Trump administration identified Venezuelans for deportation that illustrates just how dangerous the current moment is.
Reporters Noah Lanard and Isabela Dias conducted extensive interviews with the friends, families, and community members of several men who had been sent to El Salvador. They found no evidence that these men were, as the Trump administration alleged, members of the Tren de Aragua gang. Rather, the reporters found, they were abducted purely because they have tattoos.
Neri Alvarado Borges, a Venezuelan baker who lived in the Dallas area, is a case in point.
No one who knew him believed he had any connection to Tren de Aragua. They did, however, note that he had a large tattoo of a ribbon — a tribute to his brother, Nelyerson, a 15-year-old with autism. According to Borges, this tattoo and two others were the sole reasons for his detention.
“Well, you’re here because of your tattoos,” an ICE agent told Borges, per Mother Jones’ reporting. “We’re finding and questioning everyone who has tattoos.”
This is, as a matter of law enforcement, an absurd policy. Experts on Tren de Aragua do not believe there is a generally reliable way to use tattoos to identify gang members. This is substantiated by other reports of ICE mistakes, such as sending a professional soccer player to a Salvadoran prison because, his lawyer says, of his Real Madrid ink.
But as an attempt to assert power, it makes sense. The government has identified groups they wish to repress — like Venezuelan migrants and pro-Palestinian activists — and is using the threat of abduction and physical harm to control or silence them. It is classic authoritarian politics: using law enforcement to punish law-abiding individuals who belong to the wrong groups or have the wrong ideas.
It is easy to see why noncitizens are getting the worst of it right now. They enjoy fewer rights under the American legal system, making it far easier to subject them to the brutest of brute force.
Yet, as Trump’s treatment of universities and federal bureaucrats shows, he is eager to wield arbitrary power against citizens as well. And there are good reasons to believe that versions of the tactics being used on immigrants today might one day be directed against citizens — not the least of which is the Trump team’s longstanding fascination with “denaturalization,” the process of stripping citizenship from naturalized Americans.
In his 2021 book Immigration and Freedom, political theorist Chandran Kukathas argues that immigration enforcement by its very nature entails restrictions on citizens’ rights. The very act of trying to distinguish between citizens and noncitizens, for the purposes of deportation or provision of benefits, requires increased levels of surveillance and monitoring against every person residing in the country. How else are governments to distinguish between those they intend to target and those whom they do not?
Kukathas is writing about immigration enforcement systems in general — pointing out that even the best-intentioned ones require some restrictions on freedom. But what happens when you have an attempt to wield the powers created by immigration enforcement in an arbitrary manner, one seemingly designed to repress critics and sow terror?
Well, then you get statements like this one from White House aide Stephen Miller: “Dear marxist judges: If an illegal alien criminal breaks into our country the only ‘process’ he is entitled to is deportation.”
Miller here is not just expressing contempt for the idea of “due process.” He is expressing contempt for the idea that there should be any legal checks on their ability to identify whom to deport. Due process exists because law enforcement can’t be trusted to only go after the “right” targets. Free societies depend on oversight and limitations on police power. Otherwise, freedoms are just words on paper subject to the whims of those who have guns.
In expressing such unmitigated hostility to this idea, Miller has shown us the disturbing linkage between the administration’s assault on immigrants, its repression of American citizens, and its contempt for legal oversight.
They are acting like they have the right to go after whomever they want, for whatever reason they went, in whatever manner they want — and that anyone who tries to stop them is disloyal at best and a terrorist sympathizer at worst.
We’ve seen this kind of politics before. And its track record is grim.
