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Two Immigrant First Amendment Heroes Separated by Three Centuries

14 0
04.04.2025

Engraving of Andrew Hamilton defending John Peter Zenger in court, 1734-5 – Public Domain

Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish doctoral student in child psychology at Tufts University in Medford, was standing alone on a sidewalk last Tuesday when she was surrounded a gang of unidentified black-clad assailants wearing black masks, Screaming in terror, the 30-year-old woman had her wrists cuffed behind her back, and was spirited away to an unmarked SUV even arrested, since her accostors weren’t even sworn officers of the law — in an unmarked SUV, driven across multiple state lines and brought to a number of government offices in violation of a federal court order. Over a period of 24 hours, during which she may not even have been offered any food, even though when kidnapped she had been on her way to break the Ramadan fast with friends, she was flown and driven without anyone’s knowledge and dumped in a for-profit privately contracted detention cent in Louisiana, where she now awaits potential deportation. In all that frightening time she was never formally arrested, because the thugs who hd grabbed her were not sworn law-enforcement officers.

Her “crime?” Committing journalism.

Although Ozturk has not been charged with anything, her student visa has nonetheless been voided by a boastful Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who claims an article she co-wrote (over a year ago!) in the Tufts student paper shows she is a supporter of Hamas, is “antisemitic” and “could interfere with US foreign policy”—all patently absurd falsehoods.

Read the op-ed article she co-authored in a student newspaper which is the whole basis for Rubio’s action. If you, dear reader, can discover the remotest shred of evidence of the authors’ supporting Hamas of being anti-semitic, much less a threat to........

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