The arrest and detention of Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk raises significant First Amendment and free press concerns. Ozturk’s case has been described as one of the most shameful chapters in First Amendment history and a vitally crucial free press case.
Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national, came to the United States in 2018 after being named a recipient of a prestigious Fulbright scholarship. She lawfully entered the country on an F-1 visa—an immigration status generally granted to international students enrolled in academic programs at accredited American universities. She enrolled at Columbia University’s Teachers College in graduate studies, where she secured a master’s degree in psychological development and children’s media.
After securing the master’s degree at Columbia, she undertook a doctoral program at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts. That allowed her to continue her research as a PhD student in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development.
That is what Ozturk was doing in March 2024 when university student protests against Israel’s war on Gaza swelled across the nation. In support of those protests, Ozturk and three co-authors—Fatima Rahman, Genesis Perez, and Nocholas Ambeliotis—penned an op-ed for the Tufts University student newspaper, The Tufts Daily, urging university officials to declare Israel’s assault on the Palestinian people as “genocide.” They also advocated that Tufts disclose all its investments and sever all ties with any companies with direct or indirect ties to the Israeli government.
Canary Mission is an anonymously created and managed website with a public database. This right-wing funded website primarily identifies and tracks students, professors, and political activists at North American universities it believes harbor hatred of Jews, Israel, and the U.S. and who promote anti-Israel, anti Semitic views. The website profiles these targeted individuals by posting their names, photographs, social media posts, affiliations, and social/political activities in the public domain.
The website often sends its profiles to employers, law enforcement agencies, and universities in a fanatical zeal to suppress the right to First Amendment expression. Since its 2014 inception, the website has been utilized by Israel’s intelligence agencies to interrogate and even deny entry into Israel of those profiled by the website, including Americans and international students.
Canary Mission’s funding and resources are highly secret, including its leadership, but some published reports have linked it to right-wing supporters in both Israel and America. With its blacklisting, misrepresentations, and falsehoods, the Canary Mission functions much like the U.S. McCarthyism forces did in the 1950s. They try to destroy peoples’ professional reputations and cause harm to their personal lives.
That is what Canary Mission did to Rumeysa Ozturk.
Saying she was part of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, the website on February 6, 2025 posted her photograph, details and identification of her place of residence, screen-shots of the op-ed piece she co-authored, her LinkedIn profile, and the description of the courses she was scheduled to teach at Tufts. It was a terrible mischaracterization.
All available media reports—the Harvard Crimson, Reason Magazine, and The Duke Chronicle—said Ozturk’s only act of political activism was the Tufts Daily op-ed piece she co-authored with three other people, none of whom faced any adverse consequences for their part in the op-ed.
During his 2024 presidential campaign, President Donald Trump declared that, if elected, he would “throw out” of the country any pro-Palestinian student protestors. As soon Trump assumed authoritarian control over the reign of presidential powers and put in place his deportation enforcement officials he wanted, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began drawing up lists of individuals, groups, and gangs of both documented and undocumented people they targeted for deportation.
One of the individual quickly targeted for arrest and deportation by these governmental agencies was Rumeysa Ozturk.
On March 25, 2025, masked and dressed in plainclothes, six ICE agents, who did not identify themselves, snatched Ozturk off a street in Somerville, Massachusetts, a short distance from her residence. Without telling her why she was being arrested, or notifying her family or attorney of the arrest, ICE agents, while secretly holding her incommunicado in several detention facilities in different states (New Hampshire and Vermont). IN an attempt to forum shop Ozturk’s deportation, agents flew her to a CIA-like deportation facility in Basile, Louisiana—one owned and operated by a private-prison company known as the GEO Group, Inc., which has a horrible reputation in private-prison management. ICE detention centers clustered in Louisiana have been coined the “blackhole,” where immigration detainees disappear and are held without proper access to lawyers, healthcare, and are subjected to human rights violations and physical and sexual abuse.
Ozturk’s attorneys have charged that the sole reason she was arrested and targeted for deportation was the Canary Mission profile.
Following the lead of the White House, ICE said Ozturk was arrested because she engaged in activities “in support of Hamas.” A private DHS memo, however, said she was arrested for writing an op-ed calling for Tufts University to boycott Israel—the same charge Canary Mission had leveled against her in its February profile.
Whether or not ICE or DHS used the Canary Mission profile of Ozturk to target her for deportation is open to speculation, what is not open to speculation is the fact that the government, through DHS and ICE, violated her First Amendment right to freedom of expression; her due process “liberty interests” right guaranteed by the 5th Amendment to reside in this country –a right that cannot be revoked absent notice, hearing, reasons for revocation, and opportunity to appeal; and her 4th Amendment right against the unlawful search and seizure without probable cause, when kidnapped by the six masked ICE agents.
Discovery in such a civil rights lawsuit would, in all probability, produce evidence that ICE did use information from Ozturk’s Canary Mission profile (given the website’s public boasting of the influence it has with the Trump administration) to target her for deportation. Discovery evidence would reveal that the website reported the profile to ICE and/or DHS as part of its effort to violate Ozturk’s First, Fifth, and Fourth Amendment rights. That could make Canary Mission subject to the same civil rights lawsuit as the two government agencies.
Video of Ozturk’s arrest by the terrorist-looking masked ICE agents has circulated online and been widely seen through mainstream media outlets.
ProPublica reports that Boston-area activists had set up cameras throughout the area of arrest, knowing that ICE, which had conducted numerous immigration raids the week before in the area, would snatch some unsuspecting person in the area in its authoritarian, oppressive manner. The activists were right.
Fatema Ahmad, with the Boston Muslim Justice League, said the first call that came in about the arrest described it as a “kidnapping.”
“What broke me was her screaming,” Ahmad told ProPublica. “And knowing that the same thing had happened to almost 400 people in the Boston-area the week before.”
The Turkish-based Anadolu Agency reports that, besides targeting international students like Ozturk, Canary Mission also targets Muslims, Arabs, and organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Qatar-based media outlet, Al Jazeera, to do reputational harm.
The Anadolu Agency describes the hate-driven platform this way:
“Although the group primarily targets Muslim, Arab, and immigrant students and academics, it also includes Jewish individuals who oppose the occupation of Palestine. Some profiles contain highly personal details, raising privacy concerns. For instance, Stanford student Esther Tsvayg’s childhood photos were included in her profile, drawing criticism.
“Google searches reveal that Canary Mission’s targets are highlighted on far-right websites, showing the platform’s direct impact on their futures. Jewish student Zoe Jasper, in a 2019 article, expressed her fear upon learning she was listed, noting that it ultimately pushed her to become more involved in progressive movements.
“According to a 2018 report by Haaretz, Israeli intelligence directly benefits from Canary Mission’s surveillance activities. It is said that the data collected by the group is used to identify individuals who will be banned from entering Israel…
“Canary Mission conducts a systematic smear campaign to silence pro-Palestinian activists by posting their personal information and photos on its website. It then attempts to discredit them on social media by accusing them of ‘antisemitism’ or ‘supporting terrorism,’ often using anonymous accounts to spread insults, harassment, and threats.
“After being suspended in 2018 for violating social media rules, Canary Mission’s X account was quickly reinstated and continues to uphold its surveillance and pressure tactics.”
The federal courts have since intervened and blocked Rumeysa Ozturk’s deportation. After six weeks in detention, she was released on her own recognisance, with no travel restrictions, while a federal court in Vermont determines whether she was illegally detained and targeted for deportation in violation of her “constitutional rights, including free speech and due process.”
Writing on the Cato institute’s blog, Thomas A. Berry sums it up, “As Justice Frank Murphy wrote in a concurrence in the Wixon case, the freedom of foreign nationals lawfully residing in the United States is ‘not dependent upon their conformity to the popular notions of the moment,’ because the First Amendment ‘belongs to them as well as to all citizens.’
Ozturk’s detention and the revocation of her visa violate the First Amendment, and the courts should order her released.
The courts and the Trump administration are continually spiraling toward a constitutional crisis: the courts’ efforts to protect the rule of law over Trump’s openly stated belief that it is the rule of law.
The King has arrived.
The question is whether the nation will kiss his ring as many have already done.
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