By James Bovard
The Future of Freedom Foundation
August 22, 2025
"If it is known that authorities have power to coerce, few people will wait for actual coercion," economist Friedrich Hayek wrote in the 1956 foreword to his 1944 classic The Road to Serfdom. Hayek's insight could be the Rosetta Stone for understanding the Trump administration's zealotry for assailing freedom of speech.
On March 25, six masked federal agents seized a Turkish graduate student on the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts. Rumeysa Ozturk, who was wearing a hijab, was a Fulbright scholar working on a doctorate at Tufts University. Ozturk didn't know what was happening when she was first grabbed and later said she thought she might be killed.
She was abducted and vanished into the maw of the federal detention system. She was put in leg shackles and had a chain placed around her waist. She was frog marched out like a terrorist kingpin.
A federal judge speedily ordered the Trump administration not to remove Ozturk from New England. But Trump administration officials ignored that court order and hustled Ozturk from Massachusetts to federal detention facilities in Louisiana.
Criticizing Israel
Almost a year before she was seized on the streets near Boston, Ozturk had coauthored an op-ed piece for the Tufts student newspaper criticizing the university's refusal to divest from Israel despite "credible accusations of... indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide."
That was all it took to nullify the formal student visa that the U.S. government had previously approved for Ozturk. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson justified seizing the 30-year-old graduate student: "DHS and ICE investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans. Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated." Ozturk never mentioned Hamas in her op-ed. Ozturk has not been linked to any campus protests at Tufts or elsewhere. She simply cowrote an opinion piece. As the New York Post noted shortly after her arrest, DHS "alleged that Ozturk was a supporter of Hamas but has yet to provide any evidence to that effect."
The video of the arrest spurred tidal waves of online celebrations by groups who wanted to forcibly silence all campus protests. When Secretary of State Marco Rubio was asked about the case while traveling in Guyana, he justified revoking Ozturk's visa: "If you apply for a visa... and you tell us that the reason you are coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds but because you want to participate in movements that vandalize universities, harass students, take over buildings, and cause chaos - we're not giving you that visa." Rubio added: "It's crazy - stupid, even - for any country to let people in who say, 'I'm going to your universities to riot, take over libraries, and harass people.' We gave you a visa to study and earn a degree - not to become a social activist tearing up our campuses."
Rubio promised: "Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas." Is criticizing a foreign government now considered proof of lunacy in the White House? Does the Trump administration consider op-eds to be a weapon of mass destruction? Or did the secretary of state somehow become an omniscient expert on derangement?
A state kidnapping
On March 27, more than 30 Democratic members of Congress sent a letter to Rubio and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem demanding information on the case in which the video "looked like a kidnapping."
On March 28, federal judge Denise Casper blocked the Trump administration from deporting Ozturk and ordered the administration to respond to Ozturk's legal challenge (now aided by the ACLU) to her detention.
Ozturk was moved from state to state - including Vermont - so the Trump administration could avoid a habeas petition in federal court challenging her detention. In a subsequent congressional hearing, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem declared that "habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country, and suspend their right." Actually, habeas corpus expresses an individual's right to be brought before a judge and formally charged - or be released. The Constitution recognized the right of habeas corpus even before the Bill of Rights was added to the original document. But perhaps Noem and other Trump policymakers decided to go Lincolnesque.
Ozturk has asthma and had several asthmatic attacks in lockup. At the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile, she slept with 23 other people in a cell meant for 14. "None of us are able to sleep through the night. They come into the cell often and walk around triggering the fluorescent lights. They shout in the cell to wake up those who work in the kitchen around 3:30 am each day," she said.
Ozturk stated that a federal officer told her: "We are not monsters. We do what the government tells us." So, of course, federal officials are blameless for any rights that they violate. The "we are not monsters" line has been around the track a few times. Historically, it didn't do well in 1946 as a defense at Nuremberg.
The First Amendment
Trump administration officials talked as if alleged protesting was sufficient to banish any foreigner they targeted. But the First Amendment doesn't specify that it only applies to people that the White House approves. Former ICE Chief of Staff Deborah Fleischaker slammed the targeting of Ozturk as "a First Amendment violation. ICE had a policy in place that said that First Amendment activity was not to be the basis of enforcement action. That's not why you enforce."
On April 13, the Washington Post detonated the Trump case against Ozturk by publishing extracts from a confidential State Department memo. Prior to Ozturk being seized outside of Boston, senior DHS official Andre Watson sent a memo to the State Department stating that "OZTURK engaged in anti-Israel activism.... Specifically, [Ozturk] coauthored an Op-ed article" that "called for Tufts to 'disclose its investments and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.'" But the State Department found that no federal agency had turned up any evidence that Ozturk "engaged in antisemitic activity or made public statements indicating support for a terrorist organization." Despite Rubio's vilification of Ozturk, the feds didn't have squat on her. But the State Department covertly nullified her visa anyhow, paving the way for the DHS ambush outside Boston.
The court hearing
At an April 14 federal court hearing, a Trump Justice Department lawyer declared that the federal judge had no jurisdiction over the case. Federal judge William Sessions III responded: "If the government then says, 'oh, no, she can't be released because we have a detention order in immigration, which is inviolate, and she's not going to be released,' then we're in a constitutional crisis." The Trump administration lawyer speedily denied wanting any constitutional crisis.
DHS wanted Ozturk expelled from the United States under a provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act that entitles the Secretary of State to deport any foreigner if there are reasonable grounds to believe their presence has "adverse policy consequence for the United States." But there was no such evidence for Ozturk, so the Trump administration instead used a legal authority under which the secretary of state can deport anyone on his own decree - no evidence required.
On May 9, Sessions ordered that Ozturk be immediately released. Sessions declared, "There has been no evidence that has been introduced by the government other than the Op-Ed." Sessions also declared: "Her continued detention cannot stand," stating that keeping her locked up "potentially chills the speech of the millions and millions of people in this country who are not citizens." Sessions said that Ozturk raised "a very substantial First Amendment claim" as well as a "substantial claim" that her due-process rights were violated. As the "LawDork" blog summarized the judge's comment from the bench during the court hearing, "Addressing the question of [Ozturk's] 'dangerousness' and 'risk of flight,' Sessions noted that he was not going to be deferring to an immigration judge, who, he pointed out 'are executive branch employees,' subject to executive branch oversight. Instead, he found, 'There is absolutely no evidence that she has engaged in violence or advocated violence.'"
Mahsa Khanbabai, Ozturk's attorney, declared, "When did speaking up against oppression become a crime? When did speaking up against genocide become something to be imprisoned for?" Jessie Rossman, another attorney for Ozturk, commented, "For 45 days, Rümeysa has been detained in Louisiana - over 1,300 miles from her friends, her community, and her lawyers. During that time, she has suffered regular and escalating asthma attacks. And at the same time, the government has failed to produce any justification for her detention."
But this farce isn't over yet. As Politico noted, "Sessions' order, while expressing severe doubts about the constitutionality of Ozturk's detention and deportation, only applies to her immediate confinement. Efforts by the Trump administration to deport Ozturk will continue in immigration court."
The danger to Americans
It would be the height of folly for Americans to presume they face no peril from entitling the feds to seize boundless power to punish students' speech. Ozturk's name was provided to the Trump administration by Betar, an organization that the Washington Post characterized as a "militant Zionist group." U.S. citizens are at risk as well. A spokesman for Betar declared: "We provided hundreds of names to the Trump administration of visa holders and naturalized Middle Easterners and foreigners" who have criticized Israeli policies. Last February, the Anti-Defamation League condemned Betar as an extremist organization. The Trump administration canceled the visas of more than 1,500 foreign students, many of whom were accused of having joined protests in the prior year and a half. Some of those cancellations were later revoked after a surge of bad publicity.
Any precedent for blanket censorship will propagate like a COVID virus. Many conservatives and libertarians may shrug off Ozturk's degradation because they have no interest in criticizing the policies of foreign governments. But the Ozturk case hinged on collective guilt - on assuming that anyone who advocates a position is culpable for any crimes committed by any other advocate with the same view.
Ozturk's persecution could be a linchpin in the Trump administration efforts to silence all protests that rile up his donors. Trump, discussing the protests over Gaza, promised wealthy supporters at a May 2024 fundraiser: "One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they're going to behave." In April 2025, the Trump administration demanded that Harvard University cease enrolling any foreign students who Trump appointees label "hostile to the American values." Or at least "American values" as defined by the current White House. On May 22, the Trump administration formally banned Harvard from admitting any foreign students - the ultimate solution to vexatious foreigners who caterwaul about atrocities.
American history demonstrates that persecution that starts with foreigners often snowballs into targeting American citizens. Three months after the 9/11 attacks, Attorney General John Ashcroft proclaimed in congressional testimony: "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and... give ammunition to America's enemies." In other words, critics were traitors - regardless of how many civil liberties Ashcroft actually destroyed. And the definition of pernicious speech continually expanded. In 2004, former New York City Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik, stumping for President George W. Bush's reelection campaign, told audiences: "Political criticism is our enemy's best friend."
To subvert freedom of speech after 9/11, it wasn't necessary for the feds to formally nullify the First Amendment. One of the nation's most prominent pundits, Michael Kinsley, admitted in 2002 that he had been listening to his "inner Ashcroft": "As a writer and editor, I have been censoring myself and others quite a bit since September 11." Kinsley conceded that sometimes it was "simple cowardice" that sparked the censorship. I also experienced plenty of such cowardice from editors after 9/11 and long beyond.
From Trump to Nixon
Has the Trump administration gone "Full Nixon" barely two months after the inauguration? In 1973, Nixon White House aide Tom Charles Huston lamented in congressional testimony the tendency of the FBI "to move from the kid with a bomb to the kid with a picket sign, and from the kid with the picket sign to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposing candidate. And you just keep going down the line."
The Nixon administration's systemic paranoia led it to launch preemptive attacks on its suspected opposition, from secretly searching psychiatrists' offices to bugging the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate building. Nixon's landslide victory in 1972 did not save him from the exposure of the cover-up of White House crimes.
Does the Trump administration feel entitled to kidnap anyone who espouses an idea it disapproves of - or only those of foreigners? What will be the next opinion to sanctify in-broad-daylight federal kidnappings? Are federal policymakers trying to frighten everybody into submission and silence?
This article was originally published in the August 2025 issue of Future of Freedom.