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.

We're at Tufts University.

Welcome, everybody.

A little more than a month ago on March 25th, about a 10-minute walk from this auditorium.

We're here on Tufts campus. Tufts PhD student Ramesa Ozturk was apprehended by a group of ice agents

while walking down the street, talking to her mom on the phone. There's video of this taken from a neighbor's

security camera. The agents wore plane clothes, some were masked.

Ramesa was handcuffed, put on a plane to Louisiana, and locked up in an ice facility there.

In the month plus that she's been held, she has not been charged with any crime.

The only obvious reason that the U.S. government has done this to Ramesa is because of an op-ed that she co-authored with three other graduate students last year in the Tufts Daily, the student newspaper here, urging Tufts to heed resolutions that had passed the student Senate, which demanded that the university acknowledged the Palestinian genocide and divest from companies

with ties to Israel. In other words, right now, a tough student is being imprisoned by the U.S.

government because of her journalism. My name is Brian Reed. I host a podcast called Question

Everything from KCRW in Placement Theory, where we try to confront the most challenging

questions facing journalism. And as my colleagues and I have tracked what happened to Ramesa O's Turk,

we're convinced that Tufts is ground zero for arguably the most important story in journalism right now.

This country was founded on strong protections for freedom of the press. No one here is supposed

to be retaliated against by the government for doing journalism, for voicing opinions, for speaking their mind, not to mention lose their freedom because of it or their right to be here. And I have to say that if the government's goal here is to scare people, to silence opinions it doesn't like, and quash dissent about U.S. foreign policy, about Israel's actions in Gaza,

then there's evidence that it is working and that it's working well beyond Tufts.

The other day I read a column in the Yale Daily News by their outgoing opinion editor,

Millen Singh, expressing his concerns about the way the U.S. government is suppressing student speech.

And he mentioned in the column that since Ramesa Ozturk was abducted here at Tufts,

he at Yale had been getting requests from international students and alumni

...