March 27, 2025 (EIRNS)—Although federal officials have released little information, Rumeysa Ozturk, a 30-year-old Turkish doctoral student of philosophy at Tufts University, was arrested on March 26 as she was leaving her home in Somerville, Massachusetts. She is in the U.S. on a student visa, and is on a Fulbright Scholarship. After Ozturk has spent 20 hours in custody, Ozturk’s attorney Mahsa Khanbabai had still not been able to contact her, but the lawyer believes that Ozturk is being held in one of the nine privatized immigration detention centers in Louisiana that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) uses. Transferring her to Louisiana would be a direct violation of a federal judge’s order on March 26, who demanded a 48-hour notice from the Department of Homeland Security and ICE before taking Ozturk out of Massachusetts. The federal judge also demanded that DHS produce Ozturk by 9 a.m. on March 27.
Videos of the arrest are in circulation and can be seen here and here. In the second video, Ozturk is seen on the sidewalk as several masked agents approach her, forcibly take her phone and backpack, and handcuff her. A bystander is heard in the video asking, “Is this a kidnapping?” When the ICE agents answer that they are police, the bystander replies, “You don’t look like it. Why are you hiding your faces?”
