“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 censorship zealotry.
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 was snatched up because she co-authored a student newspaper op-ed a year earlier that criticized Israel, as I discussed here on March 31 (“First They Came for the Op-Ed Writers”).
Secretary of State Marco Rubio denounced Ozturk as a “lunatic” and implied she was guilty of participating “in movements that vandalize universities, harass students, take over buildings, and cause chaos.” Ozturk was shuffled between detention facilities before being taken to Louisiana. A federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to deport her without any judicial proceedings.
Ozturk’s student visa was secretly revoked several days before she was taken into custody. Did the Trump administration want a high-profile incident in order to deter any other students from writing op-eds or from protesting Middle East policies?
On Sunday night, 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] co-authored 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.
DHS wanted Ozturk expelled from the US 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.
Because of her op-ed criticizing Israel, Ozturk vanished into the federal detention system, moved from state to state so the Trump administration could avoid a habeas petition in federal court challenging her detention. She was forced to wear leg shackles and a chain around her waist. She has asthma and had several attacks so far in lockup. At the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile, she sleeps 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.
Ozturk is one of the most high-profile seizures that Trump’s DHS has made of students who criticized Israeli policies in Gaza. Hundreds of student visas have been revoked and the Trump administration has floated proposals to prohibit all foreign students from attending American universities that fail to fully suppress criticism or protests against Israeli policies.
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.” US 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. The Anti-Defamation League condemned Betar as an extremist organization in February.
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 hinges 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.
This was the tacit doctrine that the Biden administration used to legally scourge peaceful January 6 protestors who merely “paraded without a permit” through or near the US Capitol that day. Because a minority of January 6 protestors became violent, the FBI presumed that “trespassing plus thought crimes equal terrorism,” justifying harsh sentences for anyone at the scene (except for the undercover federal agents and informants).
What legal perils will pro-freedom protestors face in the coming years if the Ozturk rule is canonized, entitling federal officials to crush any disfavored opinion? Big-spending Democrats may consecrate Modern Monetary Theory and demonize anyone who criticizes the Federal Reserve. I took this “Kill the Central Bank” photo of Ron Paul supporters at a 2008 Capitol Hill event for his presidential campaign. If the same protestors had peacefully carried the same banner within a half mile of the Capitol on January 6, they likely would have been nailed on a bevy of federal charges. Many politicians have made stark their hatred of libertarians and freedom advocates. A federally-funded Fusion Center tagged Ron Paul supporters as potential terrorist suspects, and another federally-funded center sounded the alarm on anyone “reverent of individual liberty.”
As long as anyone is sitting in shackles in a federal detention center simply for writing an op-ed, freedom of speech is not safe for anyone in the United States. Will Ozturk’s persecution finally wake up people too confident that “it can never happen here”?
