ICE Jailed a Student for an Op-Ed, Now She’s Left America
Question Everything
Brian Reed
4.6 • 707 Ratings
🗓️ 30 April 2026
⏱️ 84 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In recent days, we learned that Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts University grad student who was snatched off the street by masked ICE agents last year and locked up for more than a month, has had enough of America, and moved home to Turkey. The U.S. government had continued to threaten her with legal proceedings and deportation, even after releasing her from detention.
Dr. Öztürk’s “crime?” Co-authoring an op-ed in the student newspaper advocating for Palestinian rights.
A year ago this week, while Rümeysa Öztürk was being held without charge in a Louisiana ICE facility and her case was drawing national condemnation, Question Everything co-hosted an urgent live event at Tufts with The Tufts Daily, which had published Dr. Öztürk’s op-ed. That episode has just received a Webby Award for Best News & Politics podcast episode.
Student journalists Arghya Thallapragada and Ellora Onion-De and Question Everything host Brian Reed were joined by former editor-in-chief of the Washington Post and Boston Globe Marty Baron, First Amendment lawyer Robert Bertsche, one of Dr. Öztürk’s ACLU attorneys Carol Rose, and senior politics reporter at The Intercept, Akela Lacey, to wrestle in real time with the gravity of what it meant for the U.S. government to jail a student for writing a political opinion in the student newspaper. In the wake of ICE surges in American cities and more retaliation against journalists by the administration, the conversation takes on new, perhaps even more disturbing meaning, a year later.
This episode originally ran on May 1st, 2025.
Read the Op-ed Dr. Öztürk and others wrote that ran in The Tufts Daily a year ago in March, and see the Tufts Daily’s recent retrospective of their coverage of Dr. Öztürk’s case.
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 was 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. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.
Guests:
- Naz Ahmed, Director of the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) project
- Arghya Thallapragada, former editor-in-chief of The Tufts Daily
- Ellora Onion-De, associate editor of The Tufts Daily
- Marty Baron, former editor-in-chief of the Washington Post and Boston Globe
- Robert Bertsche, KLARIS Law
- Carol Rose, Executive Director, ACLU of Massachusetts
- Akela Lacey, Senior Politics Reporter at The Intercept
Please support the organizations that support this show:
- Ground News is a platform that makes it easy to compare news sources, read between the lines of media bias, and break free from algorithms. Go to GroundNews.com/QUESTION to get 40% off the unlimited Vantage plan.
- DeleteMe makes it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online. Get 20% off DeleteMe consumer plans when you go to joindeleteme.com/QUESTION and use promo code QUESTION at checkout.
- Get 15% off OneSkin with the code QUESTION at https://www.oneskin.co/QUESTION #oneskinpod
- Listen to our supporter More Muslim, a narrative audio series telling deeply reported stories about the Muslim experience, wherever you get podcasts.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | I want to tell you about a podcast that's been really interesting to me. |
| 0:04.0 | More Muslim is a new narrative audio documentary series from a group of Muslim reporters who've worked for the New York Times, Radio Lab, and More Perfect. |
| 0:13.0 | One of those reporters, a foreign correspondent who covered conflict zones for the Guardian and Al Jazeera, |
| 0:19.0 | got so burnt out after Gaza that she packed her life into a storage locker and moved to Cape Town after learning about South Africa's oldest Muslim community. |
| 0:28.1 | The reporter had no idea that there was a group of Indonesians who'd survived 400 years of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid through a form of resistance so subtle, the oppressors never even |
| 0:40.3 | recognized it as resistance. Here's a clip from the episode. |
| 0:46.5 | Before I traveled to Cape Town, I knew about the UK's role in the transatlantic slave trade |
| 0:52.3 | that enslaved black Africans in the 1600s, but I |
| 0:55.8 | had absolutely no idea that just around the same time, Dutch colonizers were deporting and |
| 1:03.3 | enslaving Indonesians and had brought them all the way to South Africa. |
| 1:10.9 | That was a preview of the podcast, More Muslim. |
| 1:14.0 | Listen to More Muslim, wherever you get podcasts. |
| 1:18.6 | So where is Dr. Ozturk now? |
| 1:20.9 | She's in Turkey with her parents. |
| 1:23.2 | And how's she doing? |
| 1:25.1 | I believe she's doing good. |
| 1:26.7 | She's, you know, acclimating to being back home. |
| 1:30.0 | Ramesa Ozturk, the Tufts University Ph.D. student who was arrested by ICE last spring |
| 1:34.6 | because she'd co-authored an op-ed in the student newspaper advocating for Palestinian rights. |
| 1:39.8 | We learned last week that she decided to leave the U.S. and has moved back to Turkey. |
| 1:44.3 | She completed her degree in child study in human development, so she is now Dr. Ozturk. |
| 1:49.2 | Shortly after Dr. Ozturk was apprehended last March by masked ice agents in plain clothes while she was walking down a street near Tufts. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Brian Reed, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Brian Reed and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.