by Hannah Allam

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With a line of cars waiting behind them at the train station, the two women hugged tightly as they said goodbye at the end of a spring break that hadn’t turned out to be the relaxing vacation they’d imagined.

Their girls trip had transformed into endless conversations about security precautions as one of the friends, 30-year-old Turkish national Rümeysa Öztürk, grew increasingly worried she would become a target of the Trump administration’s deportation campaign.

Öztürk, a former Fulbright scholar in a doctoral program at Tufts University, was stunned to find out in early March that she had been targeted by a pro-Israel group that highlighted an op-ed she co-wrote last year criticizing the school’s response to the war in Gaza.

Her concern deepened days later with the detention of former Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent resident the government is trying to deport over his role in pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus.

By the time of Öztürk’s spring break trip on March 15, she was consumed with anxiety, said her friend E., an Arab American academic on the East Coast who asked to withhold her name and other identifying details for security reasons.

During their reunion in E.’s hometown, the first time they’d been together since the summer, the friends looked up know-your-rights tutorials and discussed whether Öztürk should cut short her doctoral program. They spent their last day together filling out intake forms for legal aid groups — just in case.

Right up until their last minutes together at the train station, they wrestled with how cautious Öztürk should be when she returned to Massachusetts. Öztürk wondered if she should avoid communal dinners, a feature of Muslim social life during the holy month of Ramadan.

“I told her to keep going out, to be with her community. I wanted her to live her life,” E. recalled, her voice breaking.

“And then she got abducted in broad daylight.”

By now, much of the country has seen the footage of Oztürk’s capture.

Surveillance video from March 25 shows her walking to dinner in Somerville, Massachusetts, near the Tufts campus, chatting on the phone with her mother when she is swarmed by six masked plainclothes officers. Öztürk screams.

Within three minutes, she’s bundled into an unmarked car and whisked away, a jarring scene that showed the nation what President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign looks like on the street level: federal agents ambushing a Muslim woman who co-wrote an op-ed in a college newspaper.

The footage drew worldwide outrage and turned Öztürk into a powerful symbol of the Department of Homeland Security dragnet.

Watch video ➜

To piece together what’s happened since then, ProPublica examined court filings and interviewed attorneys and Öztürk’s close friend, who regularly speaks to her in detention. What emerges is a more intimate picture of Öztürk and how a child development researcher charged with no crime ended up in a crowded cell in Louisiana. The interviews and court records also provide a glimpse into a sprawling, opaque apparatus designed to deport the maximum number of people with minimum accountability.

Her lawyers describe it as the story of a Trump-era rendition, a callback to the post-9/11 practice of federal agents grabbing Muslim suspects off the street and taking them to locations known for harsh conditions and shoddy oversight.

Öztürk is among nearly 1,000 students whose visas have been revoked, according to a tally by the Association of International Educators. And she is among several students and professors who have been detained.

Her detention was exceptional, immigration attorneys said, because it was caught on camera. What’s scariest, they say, is how fast the removals happen and how little is known about them.

Homeland Security spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment.

The video of Öztürk’s arrest surfaced because Boston-area activists had set up a hotline for locals to report interactions with Immigration........

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