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.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
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.
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
