moon
Satire for Sanity

And yet the mass abductions to El Salvador are but one of the methods the Trump administration is relying on to sow fear nationwide. The leaders of the so-called “land of the free” have also been kidnapping international scholars and students left and right, with the aim of silencing criticism of Israel and stamping out solidarity with the Palestinian victims of the ongoing US-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip.
Officially, more than 50,000 Palestinians have been slaughtered since October 2023; since Israel broke the ceasefire in March, the United Nations reports that at least 100 children have been killed or injured in Gaza daily. In the eyes of the US, however, none of this is a crime. The only crime is to oppose genocide.
To that end, the US government has set about disappearing people like Rumeysa Ozturk, a 30-year-old Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University in Massachusetts. A Fulbright scholar studying childhood development, Ozturk was accosted on March 25 by six plainclothes officers – some of them masked – as she walked to an iftar dinner. Visibly terrified, Ozturk was handcuffed and forced into an unmarked van. Her whereabouts were unknown for nearly a full day, when her lawyers discovered that she had been flown halfway across the country to a Louisiana detention centre operated by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Ozturk was in the US on a valid student visa. Her sole transgression appears to be having co-written, in March 2024, an opinion piece for The Tufts Daily urging the university to comply with resolutions passed by the Tufts Community Union Senate, including the demand that the university recognise the genocide in Palestine and divest from companies with ties to Israel. The article had four other co-authors and was endorsed by 32 graduate students from the Tufts School of Engineering and School of Arts and Sciences.

The US is in all-out kidnapping mode, and no one is safe
Abduction by the state is the new norm in the so called “land of the free”.