Tufts grad student Rümeysa Öztürk did nothing wrong. The Trump administration went after her anyway.
Six minutes later, according to a time-stamped home security video, the driver of an unmarked SUV parked in front of the Charger, facing the same direction, as if to maintain good sightlines to the subject of the stakeout. He was dressed in khakis and a cap on a chilly Tuesday morning. He carried a coffee cup — it was going to be a long day.
But the agents had their orders. They were from the Department of Homeland Security assigned to find and detain Rümeysa Öztürk, a 30-year-old Tufts University graduate student from Turkey. Getting Öztürk was a top priority, but it had to be secret. Those instructions came from high up in the US State Department.
The third vehicle in the operation, another SUV, didn’t take its spot on the street until 3:52 p.m., replacing the silver sedan. The fourth, a blue Charger, waited at the far southern end of the block, as if to bracket Öztürk’s apartment.
By 5 p.m., as the stakeout entered its 12th hour, the dying afternoon sun cast the agents in long shadows.
Loud pounding on Öztürk’s apartment door startled her.
Earlier that Tuesday, she’d heard loud voices coming from downstairs, though she couldn’t make out what was being said. Whoever was on the other side of the door, she was too scared to answer. Then it swung open.
It was just her landlord, there to check something with the bathroom. Öztürk exhaled.
She had been on edge for weeks, ever since learning that a shadowy website called Canary Mission had publicly accused her of engaging in anti-Israel activism. The doxxing site linked to an op-ed she’d co-authored in the Tufts student newspaper the previous year, urging the university to listen to undergraduates pushing for a formal acknowledgment of Palestinian genocide.
Just over two weeks ago, federal agents had seized Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and grad student at Columbia University, and sent him to a detention facility in Louisiana. Canary Mission had doxxed him, too.
President Trump celebrated Khalil’s capture on social media, calling it the “first arrest of many to come.”
Foreign students across the United States feared they could be next.
After her landlord left, Öztürk tried to focus on her work. She was studying children’s media and working on her doctoral dissertation about how young people can use social media for the benefit of others. She’d been drawn to Tufts by the expertise of faculty in her field, she recently explained in an email to the Globe, “as well as Boston being the academic hub of the United States.”
In her apartment that Tuesday, Öztürk also found time to pick sessions at an upcoming academic conference in Minnesota. Friends emailed about their potluck dinner planned for Friday, and she promised to bring pastries from a bakery in Harvard Square.
Öztürk nurtured her friendships like a well-tended garden. She had close friends from growing up in Turkey, where her family still lived, and from college at Istanbul Sehir University — an institution the increasingly authoritarian Turkish government eventually forced to close. She kept in touch with people from Teacher’s College at Columbia University, where she earned her master’s.
She loved writing, exercise classes, taking walks with her friends, and trading recipes with other adventurous cooks. She was a devout Muslim, a tea drinker and cat lover, and a meticulous planner. She had asthma, and minded her symptoms with medicine and by avoiding triggers such as dust and extreme stress.
Shortly after 5 p.m., hungry after a long day of fasting for Ramadan, Öztürk prepared to head out for the evening. Members of the Tufts Muslim community would break their fast at the campus interfaith center, about a 20-minute walk away. She wore sweat pants, a hijab to cover her hair, and large eyeglasses that gave her a friendly, inquisitive appearance. She pulled on a white puffy jacket and stepped outside, alone.
The streets seemed eerily quiet for so early in the evening.
As Öztürk spoke on the phone to her mother in Turkey, she noticed a man walking toward her, hands deep in his pockets, the hood on his sweat shirt pulled up. She tried to step aside, but he grabbed her wrists. She screamed.
In this security camera video, Rümeysa Öztürk, a 30-year-old doctoral student at Tufts University, was detained by Department of Homeland Security agents on a street in Somerville on March 25, 2025. (Courtesy Mike Mathis. Edited by Jenna Perlman/Globe staff)
In seconds, five other agents in plainclothes swarmed her, armed and some pulling up face masks as they approached.
Öztürk yelled to her mother in Turkish to call a friend, before the agents wrenched her phone away. They pulled her arms behind her back and secured her wrists with handcuffs.
Öztürk’s mind raced. Who are these people? They didn’t seem like police. Maybe they were from Canary Mission. Do they want to harm me?
A neighbor watching the scene called out from his porch. “You wanna take those masks off?” His voice on the security camera recording sounded skeptical, belligerent even. “Is this a kidnapping?” he asked.
“We’re the police,” an agent said.
“Yeah, you don’t look like it. Why are you hiding your faces?”
The agents led Öztürk toward an unmarked SUV. The neighbor kept yelling.
“How do I know this is the police? Seems like bullshit to me. Certainly looks like it.”
Öztürk marveled that a stranger cared enough to try to help her. As the agents forced her into the SUV’s back seat, she didn’t know if she should call out to the man and tell him that she went to Tufts. Instead, she quietly turned her face toward him.
Maybe he’ll take a photo of me, she thought. She wanted to make sure her loved ones could identify her later.
911 operator, March 25: “Somerville police, this line’s recorded.”
Caller: “Yeah, hi, um — I was just driving on Mason Street, on the corner of Mason and Electric, and about eight people that were wearing masks jumped out of a, like, a SUV.
“And I think I witnessed a kidnapping.”
“It sure looked like a kidnapping, and that was very shocking,” said Tom Ginsburg, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.
By chance, Öztürk’s arrest was caught on that home security camera. That video made its way online, then raced around the world on the news and social media, viewed millions of times. It transformed overnight a bookish, gently mannered graduate student into the face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on foreign scholars who participated in pro-Palestinian advocacy.
Khalil, the Columbia activist, told the Globe he remembers seeing the video while inside detention in Louisiana. He knew why he had drawn the attention of the Trump administration — he was a vocal and prominent leader at pro-Palestinian rallies. But Öztürk, he learned, was not a protester. Her supposed infraction had been signing her name to a tepid op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper, a year earlier.
“The broader implications are so profound,” Ginsburg said, “because it meant that anyone who was on a visa, who the government didn’t like, didn’t like their speech, they could just spirit them away.”
On March 25, federal agents transported Öztürk across New England under cover of darkness, after quietly revoking her visa days earlier. She was prevented from speaking to a lawyer for more than 24 hours. She’d be held for nearly six weeks in a Louisiana detention center, though no criminal charges were filed.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, with President Trump in June, has defended the revoking of visas from certain students. HAIYUN JIANG/NYT
Two days after Öztürk was arrested, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the media he had already revoked the visas of at least 300 foreign students and visitors, largely related to pro-Palestinian protests. “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa,” he said. He didn’t offer any evidence against Öztürk, but appeared to put her in the same category as students who, he said, were “doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus.”
DHS used similar language in November, when asked to comment on Öztürk’s case. “It is a privilege to be granted a visa to live and study in the United States of America,” a senior official said in an emailed statement. “When you advocate for violence and terrorism that privilege should be revoked, and you should not be in this country.”
What happened to Öztürk is central to a larger story taking place nationwide: Trump is pursuing what he has vowed will be the largest deportation effort in American history. Immigration authorities, often wearing masks, have been filmed grabbing people from outside homes and schools, from car washes and Home Depot parking lots, from inside the corridors of courthouses.
The Department of Homeland Security claimed this fall that it had already deported 527,000 people in 2025 and that another 1.6 million left on their own. By early November, the number of people in ICE detention reportedly reached about 66,000, a record high. Trump had promised to go after “dangerous criminals” — the “worst of the worst” — but records show that roughly half of detainees don’t have criminal charges or convictions.
It is clear that Rümeysa Öztürk should not have been swept up in any government dragnet. She applied for and received an F-1 visa for international students and has no criminal record. But even now — after a federal judge ordered her released from detention — the US government is using the tools at its disposal to push her out.
“What’s striking about Rümeysa’s case is this deeply troubling lack of proportionality between an utterly benign exercise of free speech and a massive deployment of government force,” said Mathias Risse, director of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights at Harvard University. “The signal [from the government], I think, was very clear: ‘Do not mess with us. We will come after you with everything we have—and we have a lot.’”
A handwritten note reading “Love to Rumeysa from an Armenian. We will bring you home” in Somerville on May 5.
Erin Clark/Globe Staff
Öztürk’s story has become a test for America, because it has grown bigger than any one episode, or any individual. It is about American ideals, including free expression and the rule of law. About the promises a nation makes, and those it breaks.
Some foreign students and other academics continue to fight in court for their right to study, live, and work in America. Others have been forced out, or have decided to leave the US in fear and frustration. Over weeks in detention in Louisiana, and the months since, Öztürk would need to decide what she would do — and what she could still believe in.
In the back of an SUV on March 25, Öztürk had no idea what was happening. She gathered the nerve to ask: Who are you? Where are you taking me?
No answer. Just that she was being arrested. The agents wouldn’t say why.
Öztürk’s coughing started quickly; a sign of her asthma worsening, aggravated by stress. For a time it was a blur of parking lots, transfers to different vehicles, and shackles. At some point, they added more chains — on her legs, and across her belly.
“I … was sure they were going to kill me,” she wrote later.
Öztürk’s thoughts turned back to her family in Turkey, according to an essay she later published. Her parents must be terrified. She wished she’d called her grandparents one last time.
In her mind, she took stock of the days of her life, weighing them as if on an invisible scale. Had I been a good enough person if today was my final day?
She prayed. I tried my best every day, she told God.
Growing up in Turkey, Öztürk moved around often. She lived in 13 homes over the course of her childhood, she wrote in college. Through it all, stories were a constant.
Öztürk was raised in a family of teachers and academics. Her father is a professor of Islamic arts and history; her brother has a doctoral degree in international relations. “Reading, writing, and sharing stories,” Öztürk recalled to the Globe, “felt as essential as food in my home.”
She relished long walks in nature and fell in love with fairytales and other stories. Her mother read to her every night as a child; after she learned to read herself, her grandfather became her “book club buddy,” as she calls him.
She was in her teens in 2011, when the pro-democracy protests of the Arab Spring burst into Syria, which shares a border with Turkey. Mass demonstrations against the regime of Bashar al-Assad soon devolved into civil war. Witnessing its effects on refugee children would help chart the course of Öztürk’s professional life.
As the war raged on, more than 3.6 million Syrian refugees fled to Turkey. Some opened businesses and found ways to weave themselves into local life. But other Syrian families struggled financially, faced discrimination and violence, and were accused of taking up space in hospitals and classrooms intended for Turkish citizens.
Sakarya, a religious and politically conservative region where her family has longstanding ties, was not a major destination for refugees. But their presence was felt by the locals, and sometimes resented. “It was full … especially from Syria and Iraq,” a shopkeeper in Sakarya recalled recently. “It’s a smaller version of Istanbul.”
The Adapazarı train station serves Sakarya, Turkey, a region where Öztürk’s family has deep ties. For The Boston Globe
In Istanbul, where Öztürk studied on a government scholarship at Sehir University, the humanitarian crisis was unavoidable. At least 500,000 Syrian refugees settled in Istanbul over time. It was common to see mothers with their babies, begging for money, or children picking through dumpsters.
Öztürk was deeply moved by their suffering, recalled her former developmental psychology professor, Fatima Tuba Yaylacı.
“I remember hearing horrible, horrible stories — like some of these kids walked barefoot on the mountains … the ways they traveled for days, months, hungry, thirsty, losing loved ones and still continuing their way,” Yaylacı said. “It was impossible to be insensitive to what [was] happening, and Rümeysa — knowing Rümeysa — of course she would be [affected] too.”
Öztürk volunteered in a program to help refugee children forge connections with the Turkish community through art and mental health initiatives. “There was so much hate towards Syrian refugees,” said Gulay Kaplan, a friend and fellow student who also volunteered her time. “We were working to create belonging.”
Öztürk’s former child psychology professor, Fatıma Tuba Yaylacı, at her university in Göztepe, Istanbul.For The Boston Globe
Öztürk gravitated toward a double major. Her thesis for her Turkish language and literature degree analyzed representations of death and other difficult subjects in children’s books. In the psychology department, she became the first student manager of Yaylacı’s lab.
Öztürk and another professor, Reyyan Bilge, co-authored a study on how children in Turkey understand death. Öztürk hoped to help parents find age-appropriate ways to broach the topic, Yaylacı said. She really cared about “how young children make sense of it, how older children make sense of it, and how parents can help children with loss.”
As graduation approached, Öztürk wanted to continue what was becoming her life’s work in the United States. She decided to pursue her master’s degree in developmental psychology at Teachers College at Columbia University starting in 2018.
She’d studied abroad before, including as a research assistant at Boston University two years earlier, and understood “both the challenges and the beauty of being an international student,” she told the Globe. So when she was awarded a prestigious Fulbright scholarship — only 6 percent of applicants were — she had a sense of optimism about her future in the US.
When Öztürk wasn’t hunkered down studying at Columbia, she was enveloping herself with new friends. She participated in interfaith events with the Muslim Student Association and joined the Children’s Media Association, a professional group for people in her field.
One year, she hosted a Thanksgiving potluck dinner. Always a planner, she included a link to a spreadsheet in her email invitation. You don’t have to bring anything, she assured guests, but if you do, could you please fill out the spreadsheet?
She had a way of turning strangers into devoted friends. Part of it was how intently Öztürk listened when they spoke. “I just remember how light I felt,” said Kate Farrell, whom she later met at Tufts, “because of how seen and heard I felt.”
Öztürk dove into her Columbia classwork and co-founded a children’s media initiative called “Kaplumbağa’nın Heybesi,” or “The Turtle’s Knapsack.” The project follows the adventures of a bespectacled green turtle, who carries books in a satchel strapped across its shell. It offered resources for parents, such as a website mapping Istanbul’s museums and other child friendly spaces, and shared advice on social media for cultivating kindness.
A tortoise crafted by Öztürk during her time studying under Yaylacı is still kept by her former professor. For The Boston Globe
In one 2021 video they reposted, a psychologist explained ways to talk to kids about traumatic events, such as Israeli airstrikes in Gaza that year: Focus on their emotions, use compassion, and talk about peace and hope, the psychologist said.
Öztürk worked on the creation of a children’s book, “Journey to the Heart,” about a prince from Balkh, in present-day Afghanistan, who abandoned all of his earthly wealth for a life rich in service to God. Öztürk and her colleagues on the project had the book translated into 18 languages; they donated the proceeds to a foundation for Afghan orphans.
Öztürk, after graduating from Columbia, had begun at Tufts remotely in the pandemic fall of 2020, participating in Zoom study groups. She arrived on campus in early 2021. Embedded in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development, she strove to become the first woman in her family to earn a PhD.
Öztürk eventually became roommates with a graduate student from Egypt. They went apple picking in the fall and ice skating in the winter. During Ramadan, in the spring of 2023, they shared a calendar full of community iftars.
“If you’re away from your home and away from your family,” the roommate said, “you’re looking for a home away from home, or a family that you can be part of.”
Öztürk’s work at Tufts revolved around media intended for children and adolescents and the importance of positive representations. She believes characters in kids’ programming have the power to, as she puts it, “model intergroup friendships, tolerance, kindness, and peaceful conflict resolution.”
The Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, and the Israeli invasion of Gaza that followed, shook the world.
At Tufts, as at other universities, students protested with walkouts and sit-ins, rallies and die-ins. Divided by global events, they argued fiercely with each other, and past each other. It could seem few minds were being changed, few hearts opened.
Öztürk did not participate in the protests, friends said; she was private by nature. As an international student, she needed to be cautious about how she approached advocacy. During this time, a friend said, Öztürk was concerned about how Muslim students were being treated and perceived in America.
On Oct. 25, 2023, demonstrators prayed at the steps of the Boston Public Library while protesting the war in Gaza.Erin Clark/Globe StaffOn April 30, 2024, a student paused inside an encampment of students at Tufts protesting the war in Gaza.
Jessica Rinaldi/Globe Staff
After months of discord at Tufts, both sides faced off at a hearing of the undergraduate student senate on March 3, 2024. Anguished debate among 30 or so student senators and some 300 undergrads boiled on for hours, leaving many faces streaming with tears. By the time it was over, the senate approved three resolutions urging the Tufts administration to distance itself from Israel, including divesting from companies with ties to the country and formally acknowledging a genocide against the Palestinian people.
Within hours, a Tufts spokesman issued a statement summarily rejecting everything the senate had recommended, saying the vote was unnecessarily divisive. In time, that dismissive response spurred graduate students to write an op-ed for the school’s student newspaper, The Tufts Daily.
Part of the opinion essay criticized the Israeli government, albeit carefully, saying that “credible accusations” against the country “include accounts of deliberate starvation and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide.”
But the bulk of it focused on the response of Tufts leadership to the undergraduates, asking why the administration was “disregarding its students who practice the very ideals of critical thinking, intellectual exchange and civic engagement that Tufts claims to represent?”
When it came time to publish, a petition was circulated asking for grad students willing to sign the op-ed. Ultimately, Öztürk and three other students put their names on it.
The op-ed “sought to affirm the equal dignity and humanity of all people,” Öztürk said later, in a statement shared by the ACLU. “Writing is one of the most peaceful methods of communication and ways of taking action that I am aware of.”
It appeared in the student newspaper on March 26, 2024, without fanfare or controversy. And for nearly a year, it looked like that was the end of it.
About a week into President Trump’s second term, in January, he signed Executive Order 14188, which declared the United States would combat antisemitism with “all available and appropriate legal tools.” In an accompanying statement, he signaled that would start by going after foreign students.
“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: Come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” Trump promised. “I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”
On March 8, it became clear Trump’s words were not empty rhetoric.
Demonstrators gathered outside a hearing in the case of Mahmoud Khalil at the federal courthouse in Newark, N.J., on March 28.ADAM GRAY/Adam Gray/New York TimesDr. Noor Abdalla, the wife of Mahmoud Khalil, spoke during an unofficial, alternative Columbia University graduation ceremony in May. TODD HEISLER/Todd Heisler/New York Times
That day, federal agents detained Khalil, a green card holder, in the lobby of his New York apartment building. As Khalil was being handcuffed, his wife implored the agents to identify themselves. “We don’t give our names,” one replied.
Khalil would be held in a Louisiana prison for more than three months — charged with no crime — while his lawyers fought against his deportation either to Syria, where he was born and raised in a Palestinian refugee camp, or to Algeria, where he holds a passport. Khalil was still in detention when his wife, a US citizen, gave birth to their first child.
Two days after Khalil’s arrest, Trump took to Truth Social, his social media platform, to reiterate his position. “We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again.”
In early March, Öztürk texted a friend in distress. Canary Mission had doxxed her, just as it had Khalil before his arrest. The post linked to the Tufts op-ed from a year earlier and accused her of engaging in “anti-Israel activism.” It included her photo, too.
Öztürk also reached out to Yaylacı, asking her former professor in Istanbul to take down any online photos of her and her colleagues.
“We had pictures where Rümeysa appears with her friends,” Yaylacı recalled. “She asked me to remove them from the internet, so that they are not included in this doxxing campaign.”
Over the last decade, Canary Mission has anonymously published thousands of profiles of people they claim are anti-Israel or antisemitic, a large share of them university students and professors. Canary Mission’s goal was to help companies avoid hiring antisemites, according to a 2015 video from the site. “It is your duty to ensure that today’s radicals are not tomorrow’s employees.”
Canary Mission apparently scrapes photos from social media, yearbooks, or professional biographies, so many targets of the site look incongruously happy in their pictures. The post for Öztürk, dated February 2025, included a headshot of her smiling. It listed her op-ed, her educational history, and descriptions of courses she was scheduled to teach at Tufts, such as one analyzing children’s media through a lens of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.
Öztürk, in a classroom at the Tufts’s Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development in Medford on Nov. 15.Erin Clark/Globe Staff
The doxxing felt to Öztürk like someone had put her in danger.
Around this time, she took a train to New Jersey to visit the friend she’d texted. They took walks together and visited a mosque to pray. Mostly, they talked: Öztürk wanted to stay safe and finish her PhD.
A few hours before Öztürk was to leave, the friends went online and filled out intake forms from legal organizations, just in case she one day needed a lawyer.
She was back inside her Somerville apartment, in the pre-dawn hours of Tuesday, March 25, when ICE agents began quietly rolling up to Mason Street to begin their long wait.
Sooner or later, Öztürk would have to step outside.
HOW WE REPORTED THIS STORY
The Globe reviewed hundreds of pages of legal documents, court testimony, public records, and news reports, as well as conducted dozens of interviews in the US and Turkey. Several of those interviewed requested full or partial anonymity, out of fear of government reprisals. Rümeysa Öztürk’s family declined to be interviewed, and the Globe is not naming them to protect their privacy. Öztürk answered interview questions via email.
Samantha J. Gross and Camilo Fonseca of the Globe Staff contributed reporting.
Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @giuliamcdnr. Mark Arsenault can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @bostonglobemark.
