On March 25, Rumeysa Öztürk, a 30-year-old Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University, had just stepped out for dinner when she was arrested on the street by six federal agents in masks and plain clothes. Though Öztürk held a valid F-1 student visa, it had been revoked, reportedly without warning. A judge ordered her to be detained in Massachusetts, but authorities moved her to a detention center in a remote part of Louisiana.
Öztürk's case is not an isolated one. After last year's protests over the war in Gaza, the Trump administration said it would crack down on "Hamas sympathizers on college campuses." And ICE agents have descended on college towns across the country in recent weeks. Students have been arrested at Columbia, the University of Minnesota and the University of Alabama.
Boston College law professor Daniel Kanstroom has studied the impact of immigration policy over the last 25 years. He says that the rounding up of students who are here legally is designed to "send a message, ... to scare people."
"This is a horrible thing to see," Kanstroom says of Öztürk's arrest. "One would think that tactics like this would be limited to the most extreme cases — SWAT teams or hostage situations — but to see a graduate student in Somerville, Mass., pulled off the street; it had to be terrifying."
Kanstroom is the founder of the Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic, where law students advocate for indigent noncitizens and asylum-seekers. He also directs the Post-Deportation Human Rights Project, which explores the long-term impacts of deportation on families and communities. He says that while the government has the right to control its borders, when that power is exercised, "it has to respect the dignity of the person who is the object of [the government's] exercise of massive power."
And, he adds, while this moment is particularly fraught for many, it's helpful to remember that "we have seen moments like this in U.S. history before."
"[These moments] tend to inspire great solidarity and great forms of activism and resistance, which ultimately have led to legal reforms, important court decisions and a greater understanding of the rights of all of us," he says. "Not to be too grand about it, but I do think it's a recurring struggle for the soul of the country. These issues are really fundamental. What kind of a country are we?"
Interview highlights
On the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who the Trump administration mistakenly sent to a prison in El Salvador
[Abrego Garcia] had been under an order from an immigration judge specifically not to be sent to El Salvador. The government has admitted that it was a mistake. And yet they say, well, but there's nothing we can really do about it because now he's in the custody of El Salvador. It's hard to imagine a more terrifying set of facts than that.
And again, although we have seen episodes of massive deportation enforcement throughout the history of this country ... it is hard to think of an episode that has been marked by this kind of intimidation and, as I say, needless cruelty. These things can be done in an orderly way. They can be done with respect for human dignity and with respect for the law — and they're not being done that way now.
On the political strategy to target documented immigrants
It would be basically impossible to round up and deport 10 to 15 million people without establishing a massive and extremely expensive and extremely brutal police state. You would have to have massive raids, you would have to be stopping people all over on the streets. I mean, that sort of enforcement is exceptionally difficult, in large part, because people don't come with their immigration status stamped on their foreheads. And many of the people who have been living in this country undocumented have been here for decades, or certainly many years. ...
But what we're actually seeing is something quite different. ... The goals here seem to be political, not really aimed at immigration enforcement for the undocumented. It's aimed at the documented. It's aimed at people here who are students, people here with green cards. I would expect that the next step will be people who have been naturalized citizens. In this sense, it also dovetails with the executive order that was designed to try to overturn the 14th Amendment grant of birthright citizenship. So you would see a tremendous expansion of government power over the bodies and the minds and the words and the writings of many, many millions of people.
On whether or not non-citizens have First Amendment rights
It is both yes and no. And the provision at issue here goes back quite a long way and gives specific authority to the secretary of state with a very vague set of standards [if] the non-citizens' activities or actions or speech in the United States would have potentially serious foreign policy consequences, and then there's an even higher standard if they're trying to deport somebody for things that would be protected under the Constitution if done by a U.S. citizen. So it hasn't been invoked much, precisely because the courts have never really clarified the exact relationship here. But to the extent that there is precedent for this, I think the precedent is rather strong that the First Amendment does not use the word "citizen."
On the protections for people with green cards
I get calls from people all the time asking if they should leave the country. I don't think we're at a moment where I'm advising people to leave the country … But I'm certainly advising people to think hard before traveling, and that includes people with green cards, which is pretty unique in my experience. ... People who have green cards ... have lawful permanent resident status, which, by the way, is status that a person is completely entitled to hold for their whole life, if they want to, or for some reason they can't naturalize and become a U.S. citizen. That was designed to be a stable, protected status, and it is extremely unusual for the government to start digging around in a person's past to find reasons to deport a person with a green card.
On why a deportation mistake is hard to fix
The system is set up in such a way that if once a person is deported, it's extremely difficult to question that or challenge it. And that's why judges try to prevent what they think may be wrongful deportations before they happen. That's what all these temporary restraining orders and injunctions are about. The courts are saying, we need to preserve jurisdiction. There's an entity called the Board of Immigration Appeals that for many years took the position that once a person has been deported, they said this in one major case, "they have passed beyond our aid." Now, for a human rights lawyer, that's a very difficult proposition to accept.
On the recurring immigration debate, going back to the nation's founding
This debate is very old in this country. It goes back to the founding generation. One of the laws that's being used now by the Trump administration — again, I would argue in ways that will ultimately be challenged, if not overruled completely by courts — was something called the Alien Enemies Act. And that came from a time when the government, in that case, it was the John Adams administration, had great fear about French revolutionaries and Irish revolutionaries. …
But even at that time, Thomas Jefferson, who opposed this sort of enforcement, said and wrote that "the friendless alien has been selected as the safest subject of a first experiment, but the citizen will soon follow," or, in fact, has already followed because they were using the so-called Sedition Act against citizens. And every time we've seen these episodes, they tend to have a metastatic quality. They expand in dangerous ways because once you let this sort of government power take root, it can be very hard to uproot it.
Monique Nazareth and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz and Molly Seavy-Nesper adapted it for the web.
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