Straight from the Autocratic Playbook
On the evening of March 25, Rumeysa Ozturk, a PhD student studying at Tufts University on a Fulbright scholarship, was suddenly detained by masked ICE agents on a street corner in Somerville, Massachusetts. Despite explicit court orders requiring 48 hours' notice before her removal from the state, Ozturk was moved to a processing facility in Louisiana. Her F-1 student visa has been terminated.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested in a news conference on Thursday that Ozturk was detained due to her pro-Palestinian student activism. She co-authored an op-ed calling for Tufts to divest from companies with ties to Israel, but no evidence has been provided of her involvement in any illegal activity. Since her detention, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, Bernie Sanders, and other senators and congresspersons have signed a letter calling for due process in her case.
Ozturk is not the only student in recent weeks who has been targeted by immigration authorities on vague or unsubstantiated charges. Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student studying in the United States on a green card, faces deportation for his pro-Palestinian campus activism. A doctoral student at the University of Alabama, Alireza Doroudi, was also detained for unclear reasons. Postdoctoral fellow Badar Khan Suri of Georgetown University is in custody though it appears he has not been involved in any illegal activity.
There are countless examples of autocratic regimes using creative methods to suppress dissent. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Türkiye recently stripped Istanbul mayor and opposition leader Ekrem İmamoğlu of his university degree to kneecap him as an electoral contender, as candidates must legally hold university degrees to run for the Turkish presidency. Since the start of the protests against İmamoğlu's arrest on March 19, nearly 2,000 people have been arrested, most of them students. On March 30, 21-year-old student activist Berkay Gezgin, a youth organizer for İmamoğlu's 2019 mayoral campaign, was snatched off the street in Istanbul by waiting police officers.
In a comparable example, a 16-year-old girl was arrested in Russia in 2024 over an allegedly anti-government school poster. For putting up placards calling President Vladimir Putin adversary a "Hero of Russia", she was charged with "public calls for committing terrorist activities or public justification of terrorism". She joined the 20,000 other citizens who have been arrested for participation in anti-war protests in Russia since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Obscure tactics such as canceling degrees and detaining people for peaceful activism are tools from the autocratic playbook. Suddenly, as in the case of Khan Suri, the application of a rarely used provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act to justify deportation begins to sound familiar. If freedom of expression and rule of law are not zealously guarded, there are plenty of examples in Türkiye, Russia, and other authoritarian states that serve as warnings of what may follow.