The scene was as banal as it was chilling. A sedate street in suburban Boston, with the city’s blanched spring light. A woman walking alone wearing a backpack, quickly surrounded by a converging group whose faces are obscured by scarves or hats. A brief shriek, and then wrist restraints, followed by a calm, almost relaxed, escort to awaiting cars.
It took about 40 seconds to lift Rumeysa Ozturk off the streets. The recording captures the anonymous videographer, from the vantage point of a first floor window or balcony, calling for her detainers to identify themselves.
“Bit of a kidnapping going on here?”
“We gonna see some faces?”
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It later emerged that the woman, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts, had been arrested by plain-clothes US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials for, her lawyers argue, doing nothing more than writing an oped piece in the college paper last year that was critical of the college’s handling of pro-Palestinian protesters.
By the time a Massachusetts federal judge ruled that she must be detained within the state, she had already been transferred to a holding facility in Louisiana. The following day, a big crowd gathered at Powder Square Park, in Somerville, to support Ozturk and demand explanation. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, provided it during a media appearance.
“Oh, we revoked her visa. It’s an F-1 visa, I believe. We revoked it and here’s why: If you go apply for a visa anywhere in the world to be a student and you tell us the reason you want to come to the United States is not just because you want to write opeds but because you want to participate in movements that involve doing things like vandalising universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus ... we are not going to give you a visa.
“If you lie to us and get a visa and then enter the United States and, with that visa, participate in that sort of activity, we are going to take away your visa. And once you have lost your visa, you are no longer legal in the United States and we have a right – like every country – to remove you from our country. So, it is just that simple.”
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Rubio, a one-time presidential aspirant, is a very precise communicator. His accent contains the story of elsewhere, which his Cuban parents brought with them to the US. It can be heard most clearly in his pronunciation of the word “visa”, which he splits into two hard syllables.
Rubio’s rise to prominence is a dazzling example of the possibilities for newly arrived families in the United States. That of Kamala Harris, although never told properly during the election, is another. Tens of millions of Americans, including first-generation families, will agree with Rubio. Come here, work hard, respect the opportunity.
Ozturk is one of at least 300 students whose visas were revoked. Her case became nationally known because a guy happened to be looking out his window and hit record on his phone. What is terrifying to many other millions of Americans is that Ozturk has not been charged with any of the specifics laid out by Rubio - taking over buildings or harassing students.
Her arrest, they claim, is a first amendment violation of the right to free speech. Others have pointed to the sinister methodology- that the Ice officials wore plain clothes. (Though, their badges were on display.) They might have been anyone. The official explanation is that they wish to avoid their units being targeted.
But being targeted by whom? The campuses across the US have fallen silent now. It appears likely they will remain that way.
Jason Stanley, the Yale philosophy professor, announced this week that he is leaving the US to live and work in Toronto because he fears a fascist dictatorship here. Renowned history professors Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore, who are married, are also leaving Yale for Toronto.
Sceptics will dismiss Stanley as alarmist – he was warning about fascism in the US as far back as 2018, midway through the first term of Donald Trump. Then, he laid out the pattern for the dictator, which, he said, is always a man: “A mythic past supposedly destroyed by liberals, feminists and immigrants; positioning as a patriarchal strongman, repeated warnings that without him, catastrophe would prevail, followed by division and propaganda.”
He wrote in the New York Times in 2018: “I want you to be scared because if you are not worried about encroaching fascism in America, it will start to feel normal and if that happens we are all in trouble.”
The pandemic arrived and Joe Biden was elected president two years later and all of that discourse vanished. This time, Stanley is not hanging around to see if he is proven right.
Time will tell. For on the late night talkshows, the joking about Pete Hegseth and Signal has been incessant, gleeful, pointedly cruel. Aren’t the satirists free to say whatever they like?
Baseball season has begun and in Washington, the famous blossoms are beginning to light up the parks. The restaurants are throwing back their glass-panelled fronts, setting up their outdoor seating in anticipation of sunny evenings, where it will be easy to sit and laugh and tell yourself that everything is normal.
