When Rümeysa Öztürk, a 27-year-old Turkish student, was snatched off the street by masked plainclothes police officers and put in the back of an unmarked car, she wasn’t marching on the streets of Istanbul protesting Turkey’s authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. She was walking in America in broad daylight, about to meet friends for dinner in Somerville, Massachusetts. Ozturk’s “crime,” so far as anyone can make out, is to have co-authored in March 2024 an op-ed in a student newspaper criticizing Tufts University’s unwillingness to divest from companies with ties to Israel. After the article’s publication, Rümeysa Öztürk’s name and photo were published on the website Canary Mission, which documents individuals who “promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on North American college campuses.” For months now the Trump administration has been ramping up its cynical war against freedom of speech under the guise of combating antisemitism on college campuses. In his “Executive Order to Combat Anti-Semitism” of January 30, President Trump promised to deport Hamas sympathizers: “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.” During a visit to Guyana on March 27, Secretary of State Marco Rubio bragged that the administration had cancelled over three hundred student visas thus far. “We do it every day, every time I find one of these lunatics,” he stated. In May, the Trump administration revoked Harvard’s certification for accepting any students from abroad. At the time of her detainment, Rümeysa Öztürk was a Fulbright Scholar on an F-1 student visa completing a doctoral program for Child Study and Human Development. She had previously completed an M.A. in Psychology at Columbia University. She is exactly the kind of student the United States ought to covet, not reject. And yet for exercising her right to free speech she was arbitrarily detained outside her home, put in the backseat of a car, and then, in violation of a court order, flown over fifteen hundred miles to an ICE detention center in Louisiana. “It’s fully constitutionally protected speech, no crimes at all,” said Esha Bhandari, an ACLU attorney who is representing Öztürk. “If this is allowed, anyone could be punished for anything they say.” I came to the United States in 2007 as a foreign student. I could hardly believe my luck. Like everyone else who grew up in the 1990s in northern Europe, my cultural upbringing was decidedly America-centric: American television, American music, American books. In high school I had a poster of the Brooklyn Bridge on my wall; I would lie beneath it on Saturday mornings reading Saul Bellow and listening to Thelonious Monk, dreaming of one day living in an American metropolis. And suddenly I was there: first in Miami, then in New York. On my morning commute to classes I would crawl out of the subway at Union Square and walk down Fifth Avenue. Every morning, without fail, I turned to see if the Empire State Building was really there behind me. One of the many reasons the ongoing assault on educational institutions and students’ civil liberties is so heartbreaking is because it is a betrayal of the very ideals many of us not born here most associate with life in America: openness and tolerance. Why would any American want to tear up the admiring image of America abroad? Contrary to the claims of conservative culture warriors, American campuses, in my experience of a handful of them as both a student and an adjunct professor, are largely inclusive and reflective spaces in which students are prepared for the responsibilities of democratic citizenship. And yet we should not let the current administration’s brazen actions delude into thinking things were fine before. It was former Columbia University President Minouche Shafik who permitted the New York City police to enter campus and brutally conduct mass arrests of student protesters last year. And neither should concern about political and intellectual insularity and dogmatism at colleges and universities be dismissed out of hand. Everyone stands to benefit from an educational environment in which free thought and free speech is actively encouraged. But let’s not delude ourselves: the Trump administration’s attack on universities and students is no misguided plea for educational reform or viewpoint diversity. It is a nihilistic attempt to sow fear and chaos, buoyed by a decades-long campaign by the right to undermine American institutions of learning. “The professors are the enemy,” as Vice President Vance said in 2021, echoing Richard Nixon. This folkish, nativist dislike of anything cultivated or foreign makes international students easy and obvious targets. According to the Associated Press, more than 1200 foreign students have had their visas inexplicably revoked since March, leaving them at risk of deportation. Following court challenges and resistance from federal judges, the administration abruptly reversed those terminations and instead issued new guidance expanding the reasons international students can have their legal status terminated. The release of Rümeysa Öztürk on bail on May 9 offers hope — for now. Clearly, this administration will go to extraordinary lengths to bend the American justice system to its will. In the meantime, many foreign students have left the country. And why not? The process of applying for and being granted a student visa is intimidating enough as it is. I could never quell a flutter of anxiety every time I traveled back to Copenhagen for the holidays, all too aware of holding a non-immigrant visa that did not guarantee me a right of entry at the border. But the great good fortune of receiving an American liberal education was more than worth it. It played a significant part in my later decision to become an American citizen and participate in the public life of my adopted country. John Dewey’s claim that “a society transforms uninitiated and seemingly alien
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