Rümeysa Öztürk chose grace over bitterness. What we can learn

Yahoo

16-05-2025

Rümeysa Öztürk could have said a lot of things when she got off the plane at Logan Airport last Saturday night, freed after 45 days in custody at a Louisiana detention center.
She could have ripped the masked U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement agents who snatched her off the street in Somerville in March as she was on her way to break her Ramadan fast.
She didn't.
She could have excoriated the Trump administration for stripping her of her visa and putting her into a legal purgatory that endangered her health and tested her resolve.
She didn't.
She could have confirmed the Trump White House's worst fears and offered some full-throated support for the murderous terrorists who call themselves Hamas.
She didn't.
Instead, the soft-spoken, 30-year-old Tufts University graduate student from Turkey stepped to the microphone and just said: 'America is the greatest democracy in the world.'
'And I believe in those values that we share. I have faith in the American system of justice,' she continued.
Those few sentences were a powerful reminder that sometimes it takes someone who's not from here to see us as we should see ourselves.
A quick refresher: Öztürk was one of four students who wrote an op-ed in the campus newspaper, The Tufts Daily, last year criticizing the university's response to student activists who were demanding that the university 'acknowledge the Palestinian genocide,' disclose its investments and divest from companies with ties to Israel.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in March, without providing evidence, that investigations found that Öztürk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group.
She was never charged with criminal wrongdoing, leaving only the slender pretext of the commentary piece she co-authored.
And last week, a federal judge ordered her released while her case makes its way through the courts.
You don't have to like, or even agree, with Öztürk to be troubled by the circumstances of her arrest and detention.
'She never should have been detained for one day, let alone 45,' Jessie Rossman, legal director at the ACLU of Massachusetts, said after Öztürk was released. 'It's a violence to rip someone from home, their community ... for nothing but their beliefs.'
There's growing agreement that the rule of law is under assault. And if that were just coming from the current White House's critics — and it is, make no mistake — that would be one thing.
But it's not.
Half of all respondents to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released earlier this month said they saw more overreach from President Donald Trump than they did from the courts.
Only 3 in 10 respondents to the poll said federal judges have too much power, according to the poll.
The survey is one of several recent tests of public opinion that have shown public anxiety over Trump's actions.
A Pew Research Center poll found that about half of U.S. adults say Trump is setting too much policy by executive order, while about 3 in 10 say he's doing about the right amount.
A separate CNN-SSRS poll found that 46 percent of Americans have 'a lot' or 'some' confidence in Trump's ability to use the power of the presidency responsibly, which is down from 54 percent in December.
The findings indicate a rising sense of panic among Democrats as Trump takes aggressive actions to implement his agenda. Republicans were less troubled, according to the poll.
According to the AP-NORC poll, the share of U.S. adults who say the president has too much power in the way the U.S. government operates has jumped significantly since last year, when Democrat Joe Biden was in his final year in office.
It has risen from 32 percent in a March 2024 AP-NORC poll.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, meanwhile, has defended the administration's tactics, arguing that visas are a privilege, not a right, and instituted a 'one-strike' policy for students and all temporary visa holders, according to Forbes.
You would be hard-pressed to find anyone who disagrees with removing dangerous criminals from the country, as the White House has sought to do with its mass deportation program.
But when due process protections are sidestepped — a right afforded to citizen and non-citizen alike — the potential for abuse and error multiplies.
Such was the case with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident who remains in prison in Central America, despite a U.S. Supreme Court order to return him to the United States.
If you cover the criminal justice system long enough, two separate and distinct patterns quickly emerge.
The first is that we are far more cavalier with the rights of those we don't know than we are with our own.
Someone else is accused of a crime? Lock 'em up and throw away the key. The heck with the niceties of a trial or due process. And maybe even off with their heads.
You're accused of a crime? There will be no stone unturned, no defense untested, no expense spared as you proclaim your innocence to anyone willing (or not) to listen.
The second is that being arrested, charged, and processed through the criminal justice system is physically, psychologically, and emotionally draining for the accused and the victim alike.
It is the great equalizer, hitting the powerful and vulnerable. And it spits them out, vastly diminished, at the other end.
You can argue that this is as it should be. And justice indeed has elements of punishment and retribution about it. But it also has elements of mercy and rehabilitation about it as well.
So before we put someone through that process, who may or may not be guilty — and our system, citizen or not, is premised on the assumption that they are innocent — we need to make sure that we dot every 'I' and cross every 'T.'
That's due process. And it's in the U.S. Constitution. It's not a suggestion. It's not something we do if we have the time or the luxury. And it's for everyone. No matter who they are, what they believe, or where they come from.
Because right now, it's the accused. Next time, it could be you.
Rümeysa Öztürk could have condemned the judicial system last weekend. Instead, she reaffirmed it.
'I have faith in the American system of justice,' she said, seeing us as we badly need to see ourselves again.
Associated Press reports are included in this story.
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