Last year, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University named Rumeysa Öztürk co-wrote an op-ed for the school’s college newspaper complaining about the administration’s failure to respect student government demands for the university to divest from Israel. (Few seem to have read the piece; rather than a statement of antisemitic ideology, it is a bland “process” complaint about antisemitic ideology, larded with gratuitous quotes from James Baldwin — typically forgettable left-wing juvenilia, in other words.)
As a follow-up, on Tuesday of last week, plainclothes U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials detained and then arrested Öztürk on the streets of Boston without prior warning. She now sits in a detention cell in Louisiana, awaiting a deportation hearing. Despite persistent rumors that “more is coming” with regard to Öztürk’s activities in America, to this point, the federal government has offered no public evidence against her beyond the op-ed — and in this case none is required. For the secretary of state is indeed granted statutorily broad discretion to remove noncitizens from the country, as Andy McCarthy has explained in detail over the past weeks.
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