BONUS: Rümeysa Öztürk is Locked Up for an Op-ed

The Intercept Briefing

The Intercept

Politics, Daily News, History, News

4.8 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 5 May 2025

⏱️ 77 minutes

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Summary

The Intercept Briefing is sharing a recent live podcast recording The Intercept's Senior Politics Reporter Akela Lacy joined about the unlawful detention of Rümeysa Öztürk — a graduate student who was seized by federal immigration agents for co-authoring an op-ed in her school's newspaper. The live event, hosted by Question Everything with Brian Reed – which you can listen to on KCRW – and the Tufts Daily where Rümeysa published her op-ed, gathered journalists, editors, and attorneys, including Carol Rose, who is part of Rümeysa's legal team and executive director of the Massachusetts ACLU. They discussed the status of Rümeysa’s case and the conditions she’s enduring under ICE detention, and the chilling effects her case has had on speech, journalism, and academic freedom.

Full episode description:

Where better to huddle up and discuss what to do about Rümeysa Öztürk and the chilling effect that is happening in journalism than on campus at Tufts University with the student journalists at The Tufts Daily?

This week Brian and Question Everything co-host a live event with the editor-in-chief and associate editor from The Tufts Daily – Arghya Thallapragada and Ellora Onion-De. Together they interview journalists and attorneys, including Carol Rose, part of Rümeysa's legal team and executive director of the Massachusetts ACLU, to learn what all happened to Rümeysa and why. What did her abduction by federal agents a month ago have to do with her immigration status as a Turkish graduate student studying child development, here on a student visa? Why did Secretary of State Marco Rubio say her Op-ed was cause for incarceration? Why is she still in ICE’s custody? And what happened to the constitutional protections around free speech and a free press that we depend on in a free society?

Joined by former editor-in-chief of both the Washington Post and the Boston Globe, Marty Baron; First Amendment lawyer Robert Bertsche; and senior politics reporter at The Intercept Akela Lacey; the group wrestles in real time with the gravity of this moment, not just for Rümeysa Öztürk, but for all of us.

Read the Op-ed Rümeysa and others wrote that ran in The Tufts Daily a year ago in March.

Watch the video of federal agents in plainclothes, forcing Rümeysa Öztürk into an SUV on March 25, 2025.

Quick thing: In our discussion Carol Rose says the ACLU has filed 100 legal actions in President Trump’s first 100 days. The specific count on those is actually higher: the ACLU filed 110 legal actions in the Trump administration’s first 100 days.

“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there. It's Intercept Politics Reporter Akela Lacey, dropping in to share a recent conversation I was part of that we think you might be interested in, too.
0:09.0	The unlawful detention of Ramesa Ozturk, a graduate student who was seized by federal immigration agents for co-authoring an op-ed in the student newspaper.
0:19.6	The live event hosted by Question Everything with Brian Reed,
0:23.2	which you can listen to on KCRW, and the Tufts Daily, where Rumaeza publisher op-ed,
0:28.9	gathered journalists, editors, and attorneys, including Carol Rose, who is part of Ramea's
0:33.7	legal team and executive director of the Massachusetts ACLU. We discussed the status of Ramea's legal team and executive director of the Massachusetts ACLU.
0:38.2	We discussed the status of Ramesa's case and the condition she's enduring under ICE detention
0:43.3	and the chilling effects her case has had on speech, journalism, and academic freedom.
0:48.3	Here is that conversation.
0:50.1	Today on Question Everything, we're hosting an urgent live summit from the site of the most egregious attack on journalism that I've seen in America.
0:58.6	We're at Tufts University.
1:05.5	Welcome, everybody.
1:06.8	A little more than a month ago on March 25th, about a 10-minute walk from this auditorium.
1:12.5	We're here on Tufts campus. Tufts PhD student Ramesa Ozturk was apprehended by a group of ice
1:19.5	agents while walking down the street, talking to her mom on the phone. There's video of this taken
1:24.2	from a neighbor's security camera. The agents wore plane clothes,
1:28.2	some were masked. Ramesa was handcuffed, put on a plane to Louisiana, and locked up in an
1:33.7	ice facility there. In the month plus that she's been held, she has not been charged with any crime.
1:39.9	The only obvious reason that the U.S. government has done this to Ramesa is because of an op-ed
1:46.0	that she co-authored with three other graduate students last year in the Tufts Daily, the student
1:50.4	newspaper here, urging Tufts to heed resolutions that had passed the student Senate, which
1:56.6	demanded that the university acknowledged the Palestinian genocide and divest from companies with
	...

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