Activists rally after ICE agents arrest Tufts student

A crowd police estimated at more than 2,000 converged in Nathan Tufts Park in Somerville Wednesday to protest the ICE arrest of Tufts University graduate student Ruymesa Ozturk.

Ozturk, who was legally in the United States with a student visa, was leaving her Somerville apartment Tuesday to attend an Iftar — a breaking of the daily Ramadan fast — when she was surrounded by masked plainclothes ICE agents who zip-tied her wrists and escorted her to a waiting black Ford SUV. She was on Wednesday transferred to a detention facility in Louisiana.

In the park, Wednesday, students and community members were joined by Somerville Mayor Katjana Ballantyne, Somerville and Medford city councilors and other elected officials who turned out to protest the Ozturk’s abduction.

Activists who took to the microphone during the rally connected Ozturk’s abduction to a March, 2024 The Tufts Daily article she co-authored with other students urging the university to adopt a student Senate resolution that called on university officials to disclose their investments in companies with ties to Israel, divest from those companies and publicly denounce the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Tufts students said Ozturk was not a leader or frequent participant in pro-Palestinian rallies.

“We need to call what happened to Ruymesa what it is: state-sanctioned political kidnapping,” said Lea Kayali, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement. “She was abducted by armed agents of the state because she dared take a stand against genocide.”

Ozturk’s abduction follows the high-profile ICE arrest of Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the United States who Trump administration officials say supported Hamas, the Palestinian political organization that controls Gaza and that launched the Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israeli military installations and settlements bordering the Gaza strip.

Since Oct. 7, Israel has killed more than 61,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to Gaza's Government Media Office, with untold thousands more presumed to be disappeared under the rubble of bombed buildings or vaporized by the 2,000-pound bombs Israeli forces have dropped on the densely populated enclave. Students in universities in Greater Boston and across the country engaged in a wave of non-violent protests last year that resulted in unprecedented arrests and expulsions.

Since the Trump administration took office in January, federal officials have accused student activists organizing against Israel’s war on Gaza of supporting Hamas, which the U.S. government considers a terrorist organization.

Ozturk’s arrest has sent chills through local communities in the midst of a push from local ICE offices to step up arrests and deportations that has seen ICE agents increasingly detaining people with green cards and student visas. Last week, ICE officials said they arrested more than 300 immigrants across Massachusetts.

“It’s just horrifying,” said Somerville City Council President Judy Pineda Neufeld. “The threat of ICE threatens all of us. We know our immigrant communities are paralyzed with fear.”

Somerville state Rep. Erika Uyterhoeven, who has regularly attended pro-Palestinian rallies over the last year, said Ozturk’s abduction has alarmed Somerville residents.

“This has really outraged the whole community,” she said. “it’s incumbent on us to use every strategy and tool to bring Ruymesa home, where she belongs.”

Muslim Justice League Executive Director Fatema Ahmed urged Somerville elected officials to do more to prevent ICE from arresting immigrants, noting that the city is a part of the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, a federally funded collection of local law enforcement organizations that share information and surveillance with federal authorities, including ICE.

“You know who has the most license plate readers in the country?” she said. “Tufts University. You know why we’re here? Because your university threw us under the bus.”

Ahmad and other activists urged local residents to look out for their immigrant neighbors and report any local ICE activity to a hotline maintained by the Immigrant Justice Network of Massachusetts.