Will Bunch: The disappearing of Rumeysa Ozturk is something I never thought I'd see in America

[Nevilledog]

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/rumeysa-ozturk-arrested-ice-tufts-20250327.html

No paywall link
https://archive.li/xZn0C

You’ve probably seen something like this before — but only in a movie, and only in a film that was seeking to capture the horrors of daily life under Joseph Stalin at the peak of his 1930s purges across the USSR, or maybe a Gestapo thriller set in Nazi Germany.

At 5:30 p.m. on a spring day on an urban residential street, a young woman in a bright white coat, hajib, and sneakers, engrossed in her mobile phone, emerges from a residence. Within seconds, a gaggle of men in black, who’ve been waiting for hours in a car nearby, surround the startled pedestrian, as the apparent leader wrestles away her phone.

The men awkwardly pull down ski masks to cover their faces as they handcuff the shrieking 30-year-old woman and remove her backpack — no doubt leaving her to wonder whether she is being arrested...or kidnapped. As a neighbor’s doorbell camera recorded the scene on video, the handcuffed woman is led by these men in street clothes into their unmarked car, as one is finally heard to explain: “We are the police.”

But this wasn’t a movie. This was America in March 2025, two months after Donald Trump returned to the White House. It’s hardly a stretch to describe the masked men who arrested Rumeysa Ozturk Tuesday night outside her home in Somerville, Mass., as secret police, because a Kafkaesque journey was just beginning for this doctoral student at Tufts University.

*snip*

[Think. Again.]

1. That video is absolutely terrifying.

[EndlessWire]

2. So, is she being kept

incognito? Does the recent ruling against unlawful deportation prevent them from disappearing her to an El Salvador prison for women?

Not much is being done for this woman. I wish someone outraged Congress person would initiate a bill to get her back. And, I wish her university would just grant her the Phd, so she would then be, "Doctor Ozturk." That would make a big difference in the optics. Maybe a petition towards that could be done.

Look, I don't care what her viewpoint was. That is pretty irrelevant in the face of this unlawful kidnapping. Why aren't reporters screaming in Congressional faces about this? The Disappeared Ones are now coming to America. This a tactic to suppress our voices and our dissent. If she is not disappeared, then WHERE IS SHE? WHAT IS SHE CHARGED WITH? WHERE IS THE ARREST WARRANT? WHAT HAPPENED TO HER HEARING? WHO IS HER ATTORNEY?

Why doesn't anyone care?? For Gawd's Sake, they can't do this!