Trump’s Secret Police Are Now Disappearing Students For Their Op-Eds

For years, we’ve been hearing breathless warnings about a “campus free speech crisis” from self-proclaimed free speech warriors. Their evidence? College students doing what college students have done for generations: protesting speakers they disagree with, challenging institutional policies, and yes, sometimes attempting to create heckler’s vetoes.

This kind of campus activism — while occasionally messy and uncomfortable — has been a feature of American higher education since the 1960s. It’s how young people learn to engage with ideas and exercise their own speech rights. Sometimes that activism is silly and sometimes it’s righteous. Often it’s somewhere in between, but it’s kind of a part of being a college student, and learning what you believe in.

But now we face an actual free speech crisis on campus that goes beyond just speech. It’s an attack on personal freedoms, due process, and liberty. The federal government isn’t just pressuring universities over speech — it’s literally disappearing students for their political expression. If you support actual free speech, now is the time to speak up.

The latest example of this authoritarian overreach is particularly chilling: Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts who was here legally on a student visa, was abducted by masked agents in broad daylight. She was disappeared without due process or explanation — only later did we learn she had been renditioned to a detention center in Louisiana.

The video of her kidnapping (because that’s what it was) is terrifying enough:

If you listen, you hear her quite understandably surprised reaction with a scream, and then she asks to call the police, only to be told “we’re the police.” None of them are in uniforms. Most of them are masked.

Her supposed crime? A year ago, she co-authored an op-ed in The Tufts Daily criticizing her university administration’s stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Not advocating violence. Not supporting terrorism. Not even criticizing the U.S. government. Just exercising core First Amendment rights by publishing criticism of her own university’s policies in a student newspaper.

The government has attempted to justify similar renditions (and there is a growing list of victims) by falsely painting targets as “terrorist supporters” — a dangerous conflation of political speech supporting Palestinian rights with support for terrorism. But even those cases typically involved people involved in public protests, which are themselves constitutionally protected activities. This case goes even further: disappearing someone over an innocuous piece of student journalism published a year ago.

Everyone should be alarmed. Everyone should be demanding that she (and others) be released and that ICE and DHS stop this horrifying and unconscionable practice. Everyone should be demanding that Trump and Marco Rubio and Kristi Noem stop this Gestapo bullshit.

Even if — especially if — you disagree with her views on Israel and Palestine. This isn’t about that. This is about the very concept of freedom. The rights everyone — even visitors — are supposed to have in this country. The right to speak your mind, even if (especially if!) it is opposed to those in power. The right to walk down a street without being kidnapped. The right to due process.

If the government genuinely believed Ozturk had violated immigration law or her visa terms (she hadn’t), there are established legal procedures to address such issues. Instead, they chose to send masked goons to disappear her without warning or due process — a chilling message to every other international student that their supposed right to express political opinions comes with the risk of rendition.

And, of course, the implied threat is that this won’t stop at international students.

But the Trump administration believes not in fundamental rights. It only believes in the cowardly authoritarian displays of theatrical power. Because they are weak and insecure. They are so frightened by a random college student op-ed or a protest, they are taking to disappearing people with no due process for their speech.

This won’t stop unless everyone speaks up and demands that the government respect the rights of everyone. These are bullying and intimidation tactics of weak insecure bullies, who know they cannot win in the marketplace of ideas. They are scared and pathetic, knowing that their beliefs are bad, and that the public doesn’t support them. Thus, their only response is an impotent rage, an attempt to replace respect and fair treatment with authoritarian tactics in hopes of intimidating people into silence and capitulation.

These are scary times, but people need to stop cowering. They need to speak up. They need to show up. They need to say that this is not the America any of us were taught to believe in. This is not the America of freedom and rights.

This is a desecration of the high (and often unmet) ideals of what America is supposed to be striving for. This is spitting on the fundamental concepts of the American project.

And where are all those self-proclaimed defenders of campus free speech now? The same voices who treated student protesters as an existential threat to academic freedom are conspicuously silent as government agents literally kidnap students for their political expression. Their silence exposes their previous concerns as purely performative.

This isn’t just about free speech anymore — it’s about whether we’ll allow the government to normalize disappearing people for their political views. Everyone who claims to care about constitutional rights and academic freedom needs to speak up now. Because those who remain silent in the face of such clear authoritarian overreach are complicit.