The Magic Art of Disappearance

 

On Tuesday evening, March 25 in Somerville, Massachusetts, Turkish national Rumeysa Ozturk was on her way to meet friends at an Iftar dinner, where they would break their Ramadan fast.

It turns out she would never make it to the gathering, according to her attorney. Instead, the 30-year-old was arrested and physically restrained by immigration officers near her apartment, close to Tufts University’s Somerville campus where she was a PhD student, lawyer Mahsa Khanbabai told CNN.

Thank goodness for security cameras, the all-seeing eyes of today’s digital age, that we were witness to the act of an official kidnapping. That was how CNN and other news outlets were able to publicize Ozturk’s arrest by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

While no charges have been filed against Ozturk, according to her attorney, Ozturk’s visa status has been terminated, according to a statement released Thursday by Tufts President Sunil Kumar.

A federal judge in Boston issued an order late Friday to stop Ozturk from being deported.

Judge Denise Casper wrote in the order that Ozturk “shall not be removed from the United States until further order from this court.” Casper’s order directs immigration authorities to stop deportation proceedings against Ozturk until she can determine whether the Boston court has jurisdiction to decide if Ozturk was lawfully detained.

Ozturk is one of several foreign nationals affiliated with prestigious American universities to be arrested for purported activities related to terrorist organizations amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. They include Mahmoud Khalil, a prominent Palestinian activist taken into custody this month outside his Columbia University apartment.

In her order, Casper cited Columbia graduate and Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil’s case specifically referencing a New York judge’s decision to forbid Khalil to be deported until a court settles whether it has jurisdiction over his case.

Khalil and Ozturk were arrested near their homes without notice, transferred across state lines and jurisdictions, and both ended up in Louisiana.

Ozturk “engaged in activities in support of Hamas,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said Wednesday in a statement without specifying what those alleged activities were.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio determined” Ozturk’s alleged activities would have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences and would compromise a compelling U.S. foreign policy interest,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, told CNN Thursday. She declined to provide further details about Ozturk’s alleged activities or how they could pose adverse consequences to US foreign policy.

DHS cited the same provision in the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate who was arrested by immigration officers earlier this month.

Asked about Ozturk’s case Thursday, Rubio suggested without evidence she was involved in disruptive student protests over Israel’s military operations in Gaza.

“If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student, and you tell us that the reason why you’re coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds, but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we’re not going to give you a visa,” Rubio said.

This latest round of deportations has added another layer of cruelty when the Trump administration deported a man to a prison in El Salvador in what it calls an administrative error and isn’t able to bring him back, immigration officials said in court filings.

What all of this is coming down to is a rather public episode of personal disappearances engineered by the U.S. government.

In dictatorships, those deemed dangerous to the ruling elite often "disappear" through extrajudicial killings, imprisonment, or exile. This tactic instills fear, suppresses dissent, and eliminates opposition. Historically, Latin America and the former Soviet Union have seen numerous such cases.

In Latin America, forced disappearances were a hallmark of military dictatorships in the 20th century. During Argentina's "Dirty War" (1976–1983), the military junta abducted, tortured, and killed an estimated 30,000 people, primarily political dissidents, journalists, and students (CONADEP, Nunca Más, 1984). In Mexico, the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa was linked to state forces collaborating with cartels (Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, 2018). More recently, in Nicaragua, President Daniel Ortega's regime has arrested and exiled opposition figures, with some vanishing entirely (Human Rights Watch, 2023).

In the former Soviet Union, forced disappearances persisted even after its collapse. During Vladimir Putin’s tenure, critics have been poisoned, imprisoned, or disappeared. Journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a vocal Kremlin critic, was murdered in 2006, while opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned in 2020 and later died in a Russian prison in 2024 (Bellingcat, The Guardian). In Belarus, under Alexander Lukashenko, activists like Vitaly Shishov, who fled political persecution, were later found dead under suspicious circumstances (BBC, 2021).

These examples illustrate how authoritarian regimes silence opposition through disappearances, reinforcing their grip on power.

It would seem appropriate, then that as the new American administration under Donald Trump completes its facsimile of Russian President Putin’s regime we would also see the same kind of tactics Putin used to silence his detractors.

There are bits of good news that we can glean from these developments. First, both Khalil and Ozturk are sitting in jails in Louisiana, not El Salvadore, and it appears their cases will hopefully be heard soon in court. The case of the Maryland man, who never committed a crime, it would appear, has slipped through our fingers. He is now in the supermax prison in El Salvadore. The only good news about that particular case is that YOU know about that now. I would strongly recommend that you call the Capitol Switchboards at this number:

(202) 224-3121