‘Whole Other Level of Terror’

On March 4, two weeks before their spring break reunion, Öztürk texted her friend E. to say she’d been “doxxed” by Canary Mission, part of an array of shadowy, right-wing Jewish groups that are criticized for using cherry-picked statements and distorted context to portray even mild criticism of Israel as antisemitism or support for terrorism.

For more than a decade, hard-line pro-Israel groups have publicized the names of pro-Palestinian activists, academics and students, often with scant or dubious “evidence” to back allegations of anti-Jewish bigotry.

The goal, civil liberties advocates say, is to silence protesters through campaigns that have cost targets jobs and led to death threats. On its website, Canary Mission said it is “motivated by a desire to combat” antisemitism on college campuses. It says it investigates individuals and groups “across the North American political spectrum, including the far-right, far-left and anti-Israel activists.”

“Free Rumeysa Ozturk” signs at a protest in Hyannis, Massachusetts, March 29. (Santuit Studio/ Flickr/ Public Domain)

The effort was stepped up during the wave of student protests that erupted in opposition to the war in Gaza. Öztürk’s entry on the Canary Mission site, posted in February, claims she “engaged in anti-Israel activism in 2024,” citing the op-ed she co-wrote more than a year ago that accused Tufts of ignoring students’ calls to divest from companies with ties to Israel over human rights concerns.

“I can not believe how much time people have,” Öztürk texted her friend when she saw the post. E. responded with an open-mouthed “shocked” emoji.

The Canary Mission entry, she said, had unlocked “a whole other level of terror” for Öztürk. “It was that feeling of having your privacy be so violated — for people to spend all this time and energy on one op-ed,” E. said. The op-ed published in The Tufts Daily was signed by four authors, including Öztürk, and endorsed by more than 30 other unnamed students. The language echoed the statements of United Nations officials and international war crimes investigators about the death toll in Gaza, which according to health officials there has passed 50,000, with about a third of the casualties under 18.

Öztürk, an advocate for children in communities plagued by violence, was personally heartsick over images of burned and mangled Palestinian children. But she was not a prominent activist or a fixture at campus protests, her friends and attorneys say. Öztürk’s attorneys, who appeared Monday before before a federal judge in Vermont, say the sole basis for revoking her visa appears to be the op-ed highlighted by Canary Mission.

Ramzi Kassem, a lawyer representing Öztürk, said pro-Israel groups are providing the administration with lists of targets for its deportation campaign against noncitizen student protesters. “The sequence of events,” he said, “is op-ed, doxxing, detention.”

Pro-Israel groups, including Canary Mission, have boasted about their influence on the Trump administration’s targeting of student protesters.

Immigration officials insist that they make their own removal decisions based on a number of factors, including a hard line on criticism of Israel. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he has revoked more than 300 student visas, including for Khalil and Öztürk, under the Immigration and Nationality Act, which permits the deportation of noncitizens who are deemed “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests” of the United States.

“We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist who tears up our university campuses,” Rubio told a news conference last month in response to a question about Öztürk’s detention. “Every day I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.”

Rubio during a visit to Israel in February. (U.S. Embassy Jerusalem/ CC BY 2.0)

A spokesperson said the State Department does not comment on ongoing litigation. In a call with reporters on Thursday, attorney Marc Van Der Hout of Khalil’s legal team said the authority Rubio cites was intended for rare occasions involving high-level diplomatic matters, “not to be used to go after people for First Amendment-protected activity.”

Overnight Odyssey

Surrounded by masked officers on March 25, Öztürk had no idea who was seizing her or where she was being taken, according to a statement filed last Thursday in federal court. The operatives were dressed in civilian clothes, she wrote, so at first she worried they were vigilantes spurred by Canary Mission. “I had never seen police approach and take someone away like this,” she wrote. “I thought they were people who had doxxed me and I was afraid for my safety.”

Öztürk’s statement details her harrowing night being shuttled across New England with little food after a day of fasting for Ramadan. She describes being shackled by her feet and stomach and then driven to different sites for meetings with unidentified men, some in uniform and some not. One group so unsettled her, Öztürk wrote, that she “was sure they were going to kill me.”

At another stop, described in the statement as an isolated parking lot, Öztürk repeatedly asked an officer if she was in physical danger. “He seemed to feel guilty and said ‘we are not monsters,’” Öztürk wrote. At the last stop in Vermont, Öztürk wrote, she arrived famished and with “a lot of motion sickness from all the driving.” Officers took her biometric data and a DNA sample. She would stay there for the night, in a cell with just a hard bench and a toilet.

Officers gained access to her cellphone, she wrote, including personal photos of her without her religious headscarf. “During the night they came to my cell multiple times and asked me questions about wanting to apply for asylum and if I was a member of a terrorist organization,” Öztürk wrote. “I tried to be helpful and answer their questions but I was so tired and didn’t understand what was happening to me.”

Around 4 the next morning, she wrote, she was shackled again in preparation for a trip to the airport. She was told the destination was Louisiana. Her statement to the court recounts the parting words of one of her jailers: “I hope we treated you with respect.” At nearly every stage of her detention, Öztürk, who takes daily preventative medication for asthma, experienced asthma attacks, which she says are triggered by fumes, mold or stress, court files say.

During one in Louisiana, Öztürk wrote, a nurse took her temperature and said, “You need to take that thing off your head,” before removing her hijab without asking. When Öztürk protested, the nurse told her, “This is for your health.” By her fourth wheezing episode, Öztürk wrote, she didn’t bother to seek attention from her jailers in Louisiana: “I didn’t feel safe at the medical center.”

After the portrait Öztürk paints of ICE detention, her statement turns back to her old life, a reminder of how abruptly her world has shifted. From her cell in Louisiana, she described the plans she had in the coming months. Completing her dissertation. A conference in Minnesota. Students to mentor. A summer class to teach.“I want to return to Tufts to resume all of my cherished work,” she concluded.

Reunion Interrupted

Öztürk and E. bonded in 2018 after meeting at a Muslim study group in New York, where they were both attending Columbia University. They were in their 20s then, two bookish cat lovers who were serious about their studies and their faith. They went on nature walks and liked afternoon naps. “Old ladies,” E. said with a laugh.

They remained close and took turns visiting after Öztürk left for Tufts and E. moved away from the city. Over the years, the pressures of grad school and distance had made their visits less frequent, E. said, so they’d been looking forward to their three-day spring break catch-up. During the visit, E. said, the women broke their fast together and visited a mosque for late-night Ramadan prayers. They stopped by a children’s library Öztürk wanted to visit.

They stayed up late talking, gaming out how to keep Öztürk safe from the Trump administration’s crackdown. “She said, ‘I think this is going to be the last time I get to visit you,’” E. recalled. “I told her, ‘No, no, you’re going to be able to come again, don’t worry, and I’m going to come visit you.’ That all turned out to be wrong.”

The friends had kept in touch daily after parting at the train station. They exchanged mundane texts and voice notes about doing taxes and eating cookies. E. sent Öztürk a photo of the park where they had walked during their visit. “Rümeysa! The trees are starting to bloom again,” she wrote. They last texted on March 25, a couple hours before Öztürk was detained on the way to dinner in Somerville.

E. didn’t find out what happened until the next morning, when she stumbled out of bed before dawn for the early meal Muslims eat before the daily Ramadan fast. Sipping her tea, E. scrolled through her phone and spotted a message that said, “Have you seen this?” alongside an alert about Öztürk’s arrest. “It was like: ‘Is this real? Am I still asleep?’” she recalled.

E. said the idea of her gentle friend being swept into ICE custody still didn’t seem real until later that morning, when the video was released and she saw a familiar figure, in the same white jacket she’d worn on her visit. “It was utterly nauseating to watch,” E. said. “So horrifying and so heartbreaking to see her have to be so violently taken that way.”

Trying to Be a ‘Good Detainee’

Two days after Öztürk’s transfer to Louisiana, E. received a call from a strange number that came up on her phone as “Prison/Jail.” It was Öztürk, in the first of what would become regular check-ins at random times of the day. In interviews, E. showed ProPublica corroborating photos, text messages and voice notes of her interactions with her friend.

“She always starts with, ‘Is this a good time to talk?’ And I’m, like, ‘I’ve been waiting for this,’” E. said. Some days, Öztürk sounds upbeat. Turkish diplomats, she told E., had delivered her a new hijab. Öztürk found a cookbook and noted a citrus salad recipe she might try someday. She cracked jokes about being too old to climb into a bunk bed every night.

In one call, Öztürk expressed relief that she’d filed her taxes before getting detained — a perfect example, E. said, of her overachieving friend’s wry sense of humor. “She read the detainee handbook two times,” E. said. “She said, ‘I’m trying to be a good detainee.’”

Other calls are not as easy, E. said, adding that she didn’t want to divulge specifics out of respect for her friend’s privacy. In those harder talks, E. said, she wishes she could “be there to tell her it’ll be OK, give her a hug.” Their conversations are sprinkled with reminders that Öztürk’s nightmare might not end soon. She asked for help canceling appointments and returning library books. She’s also in the process of requesting a single paperback, per detention regulations.

If approved, she wants E. to find her a guide for writing children’s literature, preferably with exercises she could do from her cell. E. said her heart ached when Öztürk asked her to make the book a long one. The calls and tasks ease feelings of helplessness, E. said, an antidote for the guilt that sneaks up on her when she walks outside on a sunny day.

“How is it that we’re moving forward,” she said, “while my closest friend is rotting in this place?”

Hanna Allam covers national security issues, with a focus on militant movements and counterterrorism efforts.

This article is from ProPublica and republished under Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.