Children’s wellbeing, and that of adults, begins with safety. As an American, I have been grateful to have lived in a country that was founded on the idea that people should be safe and secure. It’s right there in the preamble to our Constitution that set up our system of government: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
In recent days we are seeing our government take students from other countries who are in the United States legally and detain them, sometimes in horrifying fashion, as we could literally see in the case of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University in metro Boston, as captured in this video:
Which raises a question: Is our government protecting us – or in the words of the Constitution, insuring domestic tranquility – by taking her into custody?
We don’t know. She has not been charged with a crime. The one thing we do know was that she wrote an opinion piece, along with three fellow students, for the Tufts student newspaper, in which they criticized the university for not taking action against Israel in the aftermath of the war in Gaza.
Even criminals accused of the worst crimes have rights in this country. But Ms. Ozturk was flown to Louisiana despite a judge’s order that she stay in Massachusetts, according to The Guardian. It took her lawyer nearly a day to locate her and, without her medication, she suffered an asthma attack while in custody, according to court papers cited in The New York Times.
If Ms. Ozturk is dangerous, I think Americans would like to know how. One would assume the government had very specific information about her actions before her detention. But a Department of Homeland Secruity spokesperson said only – without offering any evidence – that Ms. Ozturk supported Hamas, the Islamist group that the US government first designed a terrorist organization in 1997 and which attacked Israel in October 2023.
Speaking on Ms. Ozturk’s detention, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said to reporters: “If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student, and you tell us that the reason you are coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we are not going to give you a visa.” He also said: “We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campus. We’ve given you a visa and you decide to do that we’re going to take it away.”
There is no evidence that Ms. Ozturk did any of those things.
In fact, the chair of Ms. Ozturk’s academic department, the Eliot Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development, co-authored a webpage following her detention that describes her as an outstanding student and teacher.
“Even in a department focused on human development, Rumeysa stands out as someone who reminds us daily of the importance of protecting children, cultivating joy, and connecting to our own deeper humanity. We are not the same without her steady, gentle presence,” Tufts professors Tama Leventhal and Sara Johnson wrote.
Why am I writing about these matters in a blog about children’s wellness? Because the country we hand to our children won’t be one in which their safety is guaranteed if we can’t ensure the safety of everyone who is here now.
Ms. Ozturk’s detention is notable by itself, but of course hers is not alone. There are multiple cases of students and professors who are being targeted for deportation, often with limited evidence provided on their cases. This includes Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student and Palestinian activist who has led campus protests and whose wife is an American citizen who is expecting a baby soon. Like Ms. Ozturk, he was taken to an ICE detention center in Louisiana.
While what we are seeing is shocking, we shouldn’t be surprised. As Conor Friedersdorf wrote in The Atlantic, President Trump said last year while campaigning in New York of campus protests over the war in Gaza, “One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country.”
As Friedersdorf notes, even archconservative Ann Coulter questioned recent Trump administration actions, writing on X, “There’s almost no one I don’t want to deport, but, unless they’ve committed a crime, isn’t this a violation of the first amendment?”
As three academics who have studied the rise of authoritarian government in Turkey wrote in The Atlantic magazine, President Donald Trump is following an authoritarian playbook in which he is “counting on the support of mainstream Americans who hate Hamas more than they respect the Constitution.”
Writing of Khalil’s detention, Adam Serwer, also of the Atlantic, hit the matter that to my mind all patriotic Americans desiring to preserve a nation of liberties for their children and grandchildren should think about very hard:
“It does not matter if you support the Israelis or the Palestinians. It does not matter if you are a liberal or a conservative. It does not even matter if you voted for Trump or Kamala Harris. If the state can deprive an individual of his freedom just because of his politics, which is what appears to have happened here, then no one is safe. You may believe that Khalil does not deserve free speech or due process. But if he does not have them, then neither do you. Neither do I.”
Please stand up for Ms. Ozturk, Mr. Khalil, and anyone else who is having their first-amendment and human rights violated. Do it for your children and grandchildren — and the country you want them to live in.
How can you stand? You can always call or write your representatives or senators. Or the White House. Talk to your neighbors, no matter their political leanings. Or take part in the Hands Off mass mobilization taking place nationwide on April 5. I hope I’ll see you there.
A Child Psychologist's Worries, Hopes and Other Thoughts on the World We're Creating for Children 