Ezekiel Kweku, NY Times - On Tuesday, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University, was detained by federal agents; video from a security camera capturing the incident shows that the agents were in plainclothes, most of them obscuring their faces. Records from Immigration and Customs Enforcement now list someone with Ozturk’s name in a facility in Louisiana; Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, said that her visa has been revoked, along with 300 other student visas; an unnamed spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security claimed that Ozturk had engaged in activities in support of Hamas, but offered no evidence. All that is publicly known is that Ozturk was an author of an opinion essay for the Tufts student newspaper criticizing the university’s support for Israel.
As my colleague Meher Ahmad writes, the federal government is arresting and scheduling for deportation noncitizens, regardless of their legal status, who have not been accused, let alone convicted, of any crime — potentially signaling the transformation of ICE into an extrajudicial force. The government asserts that the laws under which it is questionably claiming authority to do this allow it to circumvent the courts. But due process isn’t just a bureaucratic hurdle or even just a constitutional right — it is how we can ensure that justice is actually being served. An investigative piece from Mother Jones suggests that it is not.
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