Tipping Point, Part I:

On Being Disappeared from Boston, Massachusetts

Here in Boston, federal authorities arrested Tufts grad student Rumeysa Ozturk on the street outside her home in late March. Rumeysa was detained as she was on her way to a friend’s house to break her Ramadan fast. After more than six weeks in detention in Louisiana, Rumeysa was finally released on bail earlier this month. Rumeysa’s release does not change in any way the dystopian injustice of her arrest, or the message it was intended to send. It only means she’s now free to fight the government’s continuing plans to deport her from outside the confines of a prison cell. Rumeysa has still not been charged with any crime.

To look at the scary thing is to free ourselves from fear. In the most effective horror movies you hardly ever see the monster, because - in the absence of reliable information - what we imagine in our heads is almost always scarier than a clear view of the creature itself. Donald Trump wants us to be overwhelmed and afraid. He wants us to be paralyzed by these feelings so he can carry on looting and destroying the world our ancestors worked so hard to build. The best antidote to fear and paralysis is knowledge. The Donald does not want us to see what he is doing, so we must force ourselves to look. The arrest and detainment of Rumeysa Ozturk - and others like her - offers us a clear view into this government’s mechanisms for silencing dissent. It would be wise for us to familiarize ourselves with the democracy-crushing machinery the government has unleashed against Rumeysa and their other early targets so we’re better able to defend against its accelerating deployment in the weeks and months ahead.

There’s surveillance video of Rumeysa’s arrest, which is utterly chilling. You need to watch it if you haven’t already. Really, you need to. At the very least, you should watch it so you can recognize what’s happening in case it ever happens to you, or to someone you know or someone you see on the street. The video is only two minutes and forty-six seconds long, it’ll just take a moment, and in that short time it fully documents the transition from freedom to something much darker and more ominous, and not just for Rumeysa. The video is three things at once: it’s a metaphor for the precarious tipping point at which we are all now suddenly arrived; it’s a disturbing, broad daylight record of a grotesque abuse of power directed against a peaceful young woman; and it is a warning to us all.

At the start of the video, Rumeysa appears on the sidewalk in the lower left of the screen as a man in the official Boston winter uniform of a hoodie over a baseball cap nonchalantly crosses the street towards her. Rumeysa is holding a smartphone and talking to her mother via a bluetooth earbud. The man in the hoodie approaches Rumeysa and she nervously steps back. At ten seconds, freedom comes to an end, as the man in the hoodie grabs Rumeysa’s hands and holds them tightly. At twelve seconds, Rumeysa cries out in panic as more men in civilian clothes approach her. At sixteen seconds, one of these men pulls her phone out of her hand. At twenty-three seconds, as Rumeysa is now frantically talking with her mother on the other end of her call, the man in the hoodie plucks out her earbud with his fingers and hands it to the man who took her phone. Rumeysa is now cut off. She is also physically surrounded by six people in civilian clothes, all of whom - aside from Hoodie Man - are hiding their faces behind masks. Several of them have pulled out what appear to be badges dangling on chains around their necks. As Rumeysa explained later, she couldn’t read what it said on the badges and she assumed she was being kidnapped by people who were going to kill her. At forty-five seconds, the man in the hoodie physically removes Rumeysa’s backpack and tosses it to the ground. At one minute sixteen seconds, Rumeysa is handcuffed. As this is happening neighbors are already filming, and calling out “Is this a kidnapping?” and “Why are you hiding your faces?”. At one minute twenty-two seconds - with the man in the hoodie holding one of Rumeysa’s arms and a masked woman holding the other, flanked or trailed by the other people in masks - they start walking Rumeysa towards an unmarked SUV with tinted windows parked at the end of a connecting street. At one minute forty-seven seconds Rumeysa vanishes into the back seat of the SUV. At two minutes twenty-three seconds the SUV with Rumeysa inside pulls away from the curb, and at two minutes thirty-six seconds the vehicle passes from our view.

It’s important to recognize that Rumeysa is not Kitty Genovese, whose murder in 1960s New York became a symbol of supposed urban apathy and indifference. Rumeysa’s neighbors almost immediately began filming and loudly challenging the agents. Also, as Rumeysa is being loaded into the SUV, a red car comes around the corner and - despite being waved on - stops beside the SUV, engages with the agents, and doesn’t leave until after Rumeysa is driven away.

Rumeysa is then disappeared for nearly twenty-four hours. No charges are filed. Her whereabouts are unknown. A judge orders that she not be removed from Massachusetts. Her lawyers are unable to contact her or find out where she may have been taken or by whom.

BEFORE WE CONTINUE, IT IS NECESSARY TO UNDERSTAND THAT - WITH SOME UNCOMPLICATED POLICY ADJUSTMENTS OF THE NOT-ENTIRELY-LEGAL TYPE VERY MUCH FAVORED BY DONALD TRUMP - ALL OF THESE THINGS COULD HAPPEN TO ANY ONE OF US. ONE MOMENT WE’RE WALKING DOWN THE STREET, HAPPILY CHATTING ON THE PHONE, AND ONE OR TWO OR THREE MINUTES LATER WE ARE GONE. IN AN UNMARKED CAR. WITHOUT A TRACE.

Late the next day, the government revealed that Rumeysa was, in fact, being held in an ICE detention facility. In Southern Louisiana, more than 1,500 miles away. Quickly moving detainees to distant and remote locations can cause great fear and disruption in their lives. The distance isolates them from friends and family, and also from legal and other support networks back home. Whisking detainees out of more liberal jurisdictions - like Massachusetts or Vermont - and dumping them in a jurisdiction that’s more reliably sympathetic to the government’s claims gives the government enormous advantages in any subsequent legal wrangling. None of this is accidental.

It’s worth noting that Rumeysa is not the only foreign national and Boston academic who’s recently been held by ICE in a Louisiana prison cell. In Louisiana, Rumeysa joined Kseniia Petrova, a Russian citizen and a researcher at Harvard Medical School, who’s been in government custody for more than thirteen weeks now. Back in March, ICE denied Kseniia’s request for parole because she’d failed to prove that she was not a “danger to the community or US security”. In defending this decision, ICE stated that it had taken into account “evidence of past criminal activity” and “activity contrary to US national security interests.” We’ll revisit the government’s very serious claims regarding Kseniia’s dangerousness in part 2 of this essay, and it’s worth sticking around because the actual through-the-looking-glass insanity of the situation is beyond anything you could possibly imagine - like something out of an especially bonkers Yorgos Lanthimos movie - and also because the situation has gotten significantly worse and significantly more insane just since the beginning of last week. You literally can’t make this stuff up, and nobody would believe you if you did.

Rumeysa Ozturk and Kseniia Petrova have been in government custody and facing deportation not because of a bureaucratic mix-up or a case of mistaken identity, and not because they’ve been charged with committing grievous crimes. Their arrest and detention is an absurdist and particularly flamboyant piece of fascist performance art, and it is meant to be instructive. It is meant to frighten us into silent acceptance of injustice and atrocity, whether that injustice occurs here in the US or elsewhere. The arbitrary and unwarranted detention of these two accomplished young women connects in surprisingly direct ways to the ongoing horrors unfolding in Gaza and in Ukraine, and their detention represents the cutting edge of the most dangerous assault on liberty and free speech in the history of our nation. Their continuing persecution - and the worldwide assault on democracy, civil society and the rule of law of which it is part - is an existential threat to us all.

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In the late 1980s I had a friend who lived in Boston who said I should move here too. I was a skeptical country boy from a bit farther south. When I asked why Boston he replied “It may be cold and urban but at least it’s expensive”. This is true. I was a couple years out of college, hauling around a guitar I was still figuring out and looking for a place with a decent music scene. Tracy Chapman had recently launched from Boston, so I made the jump. As it turned out, I ended up living in a group house in Somerville that’d been started a few years earlier by Tracy and some of her friends from Tufts. While I was there we got a piece of junk-mail with her name on it (from NOW) and we hung it on the fridge. House lore was that she’d written “Fast Car” while sitting beside the washing machine at the back of our unfinished basement.

The city of Somerville is quirky and surprisingly urban, despite most buildings being less than four stories tall. Tracy’s old group house is in the western end of Somerville, a short walk from where Rumeysa was grabbed off the street. This neighborhood has a decent number of trees, but much of Somerville is tightly packed triple-deckers and very little green. It’s the cheaper northern neighbor to Cambridge and it’s the most densely settled city north of New York. When I lived there it was mostly blue collar families, immigrants from everywhere, students from Harvard and MIT and Tufts, and houses and apartments full of twenty-somethings. About a third of the people who live in Somerville are in their twenties. I was told that the local families called us Barnies, because we stuffed so many people into too little space and presumably behaved like we’d been raised in a barn, but no one in the neighborhood ever said this to my face, or treated me with aggression or disrespect.

During my time in Somerville, I had a friend who lived in another apartment full of twenty-somethings in one of the more closely packed parts of town, a neighborhood where it seemed like you could lean out your third-floor window to hand something to a person in the apartment next door, although I didn’t know anyone who’d actually tried this. There’s a certain etiquette that arises when so many different tribes live in such close proximity, an etiquette that’s not always obvious to the newcomers. My friend's kitchen window looked out on her neighbor’s kitchen window only a few feet away. My friend reported that she’d once made the mistake of waving at her neighbor as they were both doing dishes, an apparent violation of protocol that led to her neighbor immediately pulling down her window shade. The shade had stayed down ever since. Alas.

There’s more money in Somerville now than there was when I first arrived - and it’s significantly hipper, who knew Somerville could be hip? - but it’s still a scrappy, mixed up, unpretentious patchwork of overlapping and poorly defined neighborhoods: a jostling mix of Irish pubs and Peruvian chicken joints and donut shops alongside food from Haiti, Italy, Brazil, Portugal and the Middle East, among many other places. And people from all these places, old-timers and newcomers, all sharing the space and the food in an overwhelmingly peaceful coexistence that has lasted for generations.

It’s this tradition of tolerance and coexistence that I believe will be our salvation in the coming months, both here in Boston and across the country. Or, if we let MAGA pull us apart or scare us into silence while they come after us one by one, then its loss will be our doom.