Opinion | We Visited Rumeysa Ozturk in Detention.

A young woman walked casually down a public street only to find herself suddenly surrounded by masked law enforcement officers in plain clothes. Without explanation — and in the absence of criminal charges and any due process — she was forced into a waiting vehicle and vanished into the labyrinth of the state security system.

Sound familiar? You’d be forgiven for thinking we’re recounting what happened to the Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk in Somerville, Mass., last month. But no: That was the September 2020 abduction of the political activist Maria Kolesnikova in the capital of Belarus, the former Soviet republic that is home to one of the most repressive governments in the world.

Disappearances like Ms. Kolesnikova’s are disturbingly common under authoritarian regimes where dissent is quashed and the rule of law is more fiction than fact. That a similar scene would unfold in Somerville in March 2025 as part of the Trump administration’s revived immigration crackdown should send a chill down the spine of every American.

We visited Ms. Ozturk earlier this week at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Basile, La., operated by the for-profit company Geo Secure Services, contracted by the federal government. It’s part of the network of ICE facilities in Louisiana that the American Civil Liberties Union has described as a “black hole” — hard to reach and isolated, making visits from lawyers and family members prohibitively difficult and expensive.

What we found was not just a young woman locked up without charge but also a democracy being put to the test. Ms. Ozturk is a graduate student, a writer and a community member who is in the United States legally on a student visa, which was revoked without apparent cause. She was walking to an Iftar dinner when federal agents, some of them masked, surrounded her, detained her, refused to explain why and then forcibly removed her to an undisclosed location; it took her family roughly 24 hours to even find out where she was being held.

When we met Ms. Ozturk in Basile, she told us she feared for her life when she was taken off the streets of her neighborhood, not knowing who had grabbed her or where they were taking her. She said that at each step of her transit — from Massachusetts to New Hampshire to Vermont to Louisiana — her repeated requests to contact her lawyer were denied. Inside the detention center, she was inadequately fed, kept in facilities with extremely cold temperatures and denied personal necessities and religious accommodations. She suffered asthma attacks for which she lacked her prescribed medication. Despite all this — and despite being far away from her loved ones — we were struck by her unwavering spirit.

Why did the Trump administration target her? By all accounts, it’s because she was one of the authors of an opinion essay for The Tufts Daily criticizing her university’s response to resolutions that the Tufts student senate passed regarding Israel and Gaza.

This is not immigration enforcement. This is repression. This is authoritarianism.

The Trump administration is working overtime to silence dissent and terrorize immigrant communities. In Ms. Ozturk’s case, it has openly violated the most fundamental protections of our Constitution. Freedom of speech and of the press and the right to due process are not suggestions in this country; they are fundamental rights. They apply to citizens, permanent residents and individuals like Ms. Ozturk, regardless of her political beliefs.

The First Amendment has protected the voices of Frederick Douglass, Alice Paul and Martin Luther King Jr., and it must protect Ms. Ozturk’s, too. Indeed, when dissent becomes a challenge to those in power, it is all the more essential to safeguard. When protected speech becomes a reason for rounding up an international student who came here legally, it’s clear that our immigration laws are being abused.

The United States has long stood on a bedrock of due process — enshrined in the Fifth and 14th Amendments, which guard against exactly this kind of arbitrary state violence. But the Trump administration has acted as if constitutional rights are expendable when the target is an immigrant, a Muslim or someone who dares to criticize the government.

Make no mistake: Ms. Ozturk’s case is not an isolated one. This administration has already overseen a wave of unconstitutional actions: raids without warrants, prolonged detentions without hearings and retaliatory deportations. Each case chips away at the rule of law. Each one makes it easier for the next to go unnoticed. And each one brings us closer to the authoritarianism we once believed could never take root on American soil.

When a government begins to imprison writers for their words, when it abandons legal norms for political convenience, when it cloaks oppression in the language of national security, alarm bells must ring. Loudly.

We call on the Department of Homeland Security to release Ms. Ozturk immediately, drop any proceedings against her and begin an investigation into the appalling conditions at the Basile detention center. We urge our Republican colleagues in Congress to stand up to President Trump’s evident disregard for the rule of law. And we urge every American to understand: This is not someone else’s fight. The Constitution is only as strong as our willingness to defend it.

Edward J. Markey is the junior U.S. senator from Massachusetts. Jim McGovern is the representative for Massachusetts’ Second Congressional District. Ayanna Pressley is the representative for Massachusetts’ Seventh Congressional District.

Source photograph by Gerald Herbert/Associated Press.

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