5.2 MILLION MARCHED. ICE DISAPPEARED STUDENTS. WHY IS THE MEDIA SILENT?
The New Disappearances: How ICE Targets Academic Dissent While Media Looks Away.
Update: Rumeysa Ozturk has been released from immigration detention on 05/09/2025 marking a legal blow to the Trump administration as it attempts to fulfill the president's pledge to deport non-citizens involved in what the White House refers to as antisemitic activism on college campuses. Meanwhile, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals has denied the government's request to change the venue of Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil’s habeas case from New Jersey to Louisiana. As a result, the case will proceed in New Jersey, but Khalil remains detained in Louisiana.
A Personal Note Before We Begin
Growing up in the Bay Area, I watched Frank Somerville—a three-time Emmy-winning anchor—become a rare voice calling out media hypocrisy. In May 2021, KTVU suspended him after a Memorial Day broadcast where he slurred his words, which he later blamed on Ambien. But his real clash with management came weeks later, during coverage of Gabby Petito, the white 22-year-old whose disappearance sparked a national frenzy. Somerville demanded his station address "missing white woman syndrome"—the media's obsession with white victims while ignoring missing Indigenous women and women of color. By November 2021, he was fired.
Somerville's critique wasn't wrong. It's why I'm writing this piece. On March 25, 2025, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish Fulbright scholar and doctoral candidate at Tufts, was walking home in Somerville, Massachusetts, when masked ICE agents in unmarked vehicles surrounded her. No warrant. No explanation. Just a brutal snatch-and-grab operation, straight out of a dystopian playbook. Her crime? Simply co-authoring a student op-ed that dared to criticize Tufts' financial ties to Israel.
By April 5, 5.2 million people flooded streets nationwide for the "Hands Off!" protests—the largest mobilization against Trump's second-term agenda. While the corporate media—which obsesses over Trump's golf scores—reduced this historic resistance to "scattered demonstrations" or ignored it entirely. This is how power operates: the state disappears dissenters, and the press disappears the resistance.
The pattern is clear: Black, brown, and immigrant stories are disposable. When we vanish, the press looks away. When we resist, they mute us.
The Disappearing of Rumeysa Ozturk: A Case Study in Repression
Timeline of State Violence
On October 15, 2024, Rumeysa Ozturk's byline appeared in The Tufts Daily beneath an op-ed that would become her indictment. The article, "Divest from Genocide: Tufts Must Acknowledge Palestinian Humanity," marked her as the type of thinker Project 2025's architects had circled for removal.
Five months later, at 8:47 AM on March 25, 2025, the theory became practice in Davis Square. Masked ICE agents—their uniforms swapped for plain clothes, their badges tucked away—demonstrated the new rules: no warrants needed, no explanations given (The Somerville Times). By sundown, Ozturk would be in Vermont. By midnight, Louisiana.
The next day, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani ordered ICE not to transfer her beyond Massachusetts without 48-hour notice. By the time the ink dried on the court order, Ozturk had already been secretly shuttled to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile—a facility where seven detainees had died from preventable medical neglect since 2020 (ACLU Louisiana, 2023).
The Human Cost
Ozturk is a Fulbright scholar specializing in trauma recovery for refugee children. Colleagues describe her as “unwaveringly compassionate” and “apolitical in her work.” Tufts University President Sunil Kumar publicly condemned her detention, stating: “Ms. Ozturk’s scholarship violates no laws or policies. We demand her immediate release” (Tufts Now, March 27).
Yet Secretary of State Marco Rubio—architect of Trump’s immigration crackdown—dismissed her arrest, sneering: “We gave her a visa to study, not to spread anti-American propaganda” (Fox News, March 28). The message couldn't be clearer: humanitarian work is acceptable only when it doesn't challenge power.
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The Legal Black Hole
On March 28, Judge Denise Casper temporarily blocked Ozturk's deportation, but the Department of Justice immediately filed a motion arguing the Massachusetts court lacked jurisdiction. "This is geographic isolation 101," said Harvard Law professor Susan Akram in Law360.
"They want her in Louisiana, where deportation approval rates are 89% and detainees struggle to access counsel."
On April 4, 2025, Judge Denise Casper's transfer of Rumeysa Ozturk's case to Vermont—rather than laid bare ICE's blueprint for silencing dissent: defy judicial oversight, manipulate jurisdiction, and exploit media silence.
The media coverage revealed the system's complicity:
National outlets buried the story—AP relegated it to regional briefs; Fox News published a 112-word update buried six pages deep. Local coverage wasn't much better: WBUR's 90-second segment ignored ICE's defiance of court orders, while the Boston Globe reduced the hearing to procedural trivia.
What disappeared from coverage? Basile's "special handling" unit and its seven preventable deaths; Project 2025's explicit targeting of Palestine speech; and the 46 other scholars punished for similar "crimes" (Palestine Legal, April 2025).
The Pattern: Not Just Ozturk
Rumeysa Ozturk's abduction wasn't an isolated incident, but the opening strike in ICE's systematic purge of academic critics. By April, at least nine scholars had been disappeared—their stories revealing how dissent gets criminalized in Trump's second term.
Take Mahmoud Khalil, the Syrian-Palestinian graduate student at Columbia. ICE agents stormed his Manhattan apartment on March 8, first claiming his green card was invalid, then—when he proved his legal status—accusing him of lying about humanitarian work with UN refugees. Now jailed in Louisiana's Jena detention center, Khalil spends 23 hours daily in a cell with no Arabic interpreters, despite federal requirements (NewsNation, April 2). His crime? Organizing a campus teach-in about Gaza's death toll.
Or Dr. Rasha Alawieh, the Lebanese kidney specialist whose deportation left 82 American patients without critical care. Snatched at Boston Logan Airport on March 10 while returning from her father's funeral, ICE agents scrolled through her phone until finding photos of a Beirut street procession—ordinary mourning rituals they labeled "terrorist sympathies" (CNN, March 18). A judge ordered her release; ICE put her on a plane to Beirut anyway.
These cases follow the same playbook: retroactive visa revocations, manufactured charges requiring no evidence, and transfer to remote detention centers where detainees sleep standing up due to overcrowding (ICE FOIA logs, April 2025). The goal isn't deportation; it's deterrence. As the ACLU's immigration director noted: "They want students to see what happens to Palestinians' allies" (ACLU Briefing, March 30).
April 5: The Resistance They Can't Hide
On April 5, while CNN aired 10 minutes of Trump golfing, 5.2 million Americans joined "Hands Off!" protests across all 50 states—the largest single day of resistance since Trump's second inauguration. Organized by a coalition of 150+ grassroots groups, the marches targeted Trump's attacks on Social Security, Medicare, and workers' rights; Elon Musk's mass federal layoffs; and ICE's escalating detentions of activists.
Yet the New York Times reduced this uprising to "scattered demonstrations" causing "minor traffic delay" (April 6). The dissonance was fucking grotesque: while mainstream channels cut to commercial breaks, ICE agents were arresting 23 more professors at the protests themselves (ICE Freedom of Information Act logs). But the truth couldn't be fully buried—not with Khalil's students projecting his face on the walls of Columbia, not with Ozturk's colleagues flooding Vermont's courthouse. As one protest sign put it: "You disappear them, we remember."
Project 2025: The Blueprint for Disappearances
This isn't improvisation—it's implementation. From 2017–2021, Trump's ICE increased arrests by 30%, targeting activists like Ravi Ragbir (detained after speaking at a rally) and Manuel Duran (journalist arrested while covering a protest)(ACLU, 2018). They revoked 1,122 Chinese student visas under vague "national security" claims (Reuters, 2020) and created “Denaturalization Task Force” to strip citizenship from 732 people, mostly Muslims and immigrants of color (NYT, 2020).
Now, Trump 2.0 is executing Project 2025’s immigration agenda, going even further:
Project 2025's page 176 mandates funding for 100,000 detention beds—a massive expansion reflected in the South Louisiana facility where Ozturk was transferred, despite its record of preventable deaths and extreme overcrowding. Page 554 redefines "anti-American agitation" to include "support for designated terrorist organizations"—a definition stretched to silence Palestine solidarity.
Paramilitary Tactics in Action
While the National Guard proposal exists on paper, Ozturk's case proves ICE already operates as a rogue force: Page 569 calls for "expanded use of administrative warrants" (i.e., no judicial review) for "ideologically motivated removals," while page 551 authorizes "enhanced covert detention protocols."
These aren't just policy recommendations—they're the fucking playbook we're watching unfold in real time. ICE agents in unmarked vehicles, wearing plain clothes, snatching people off the street without judicial oversight—this isn't law enforcement, it's state-sanctioned kidnapping with a badge.
The results speak for themselves: 47 student visas revoked for criticizing Israel (Palestine Legal, April 2025); 23 scholars interrogated at airports about their political views (ACLU, March 2025); and 9 detained or deported, including Ozturk (ICE Freedom of Information Act logs, April 2025)
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What You Can Do
1. Amplify Their Stories: Share #FreeOzturk, #FreeKhalil, #FreeBadar. Tag media outlets demanding answers: “Why are you silent on ICE’s disappearances?” “Where is your coverage of the April 5 protests?”
2. Support Legal Defense Funds: ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, Palestine Legal, and RAICES are providing critical legal aid.
3. Document Everything: Use Project South to track ICE transfers; file FOIA requests via Center for Constitutional Rights to expose ICE’s targeting criteria.
4. Stay Unrelenting: Attend rallies, print flyers, outlast their silence. Mark your calendar for Next April 19th – “Day of Action 50501 Movement” or “No Kings-We’re not going back (250th Anniversary of the American Revolution)”
Final Word
When Frank Somerville spoke out about "missing white woman syndrome," he wasn't just criticizing media coverage of Gabby Petito. He was exposing the entire machinery of selective outrage—how certain victims matter while others disappear from public consciousness.
Today, Rumeysa Ozturk isn't just another detained immigrant; she's the embodiment of what happens when we allow that machinery to operate unchecked. Her crime wasn't co-authoring an op-ed. Her crime was existing at the intersection of identities the system is designed to erase: immigrant, Muslim, academic, and Palestine supporter.
The 5.2 million Americans who flooded streets on April 5th understood what the New York Times called "scattered demonstrations" was actually a referendum on visibility itself—on who gets to be seen, who gets to speak, and who gets disappeared.
Corporate media wants you to believe these are isolated incidents, random deportations with no pattern. They're counting on your silence. They're banking on your fatigue.
But from Somerville to Ozturk, from Boston to Basile, the thread is clear: power fears nothing more than those who refuse to look away.
Stay loud. Stay unrelenting. They want us to disappear—we refuse.
Always unfiltered, always fighting—Zorha.
P.S. If you'd like to support this work, consider subscribing (it's free!) or chipping in to help cover the cost of protest signs and other activism efforts by clicking the Buy Me Coffee (button). Every bit helps.
Sources
Ozturk’s Case: Tufts Daily Op-Ed (Oct 15, 2024), WBUR (Mar 26, 2025),m ACLU Louisiana Report on Basile Facility (2023)
Other Disappeared Students: NewsNation on Khalil (Apr 2, 2025), CNN on Alawieh (Mar 18, 2025), NPR on Suri (Mar 21, 2025)
Historical Data: ACLU on ICE’s 2017-2021 Tactics (2018), Reuters on Chinese Student Visas (2020)
April 5 Protests: AP News (Apr 5, 2025)
Frank Somerville: SF Chronicle (Nov 2021), SFist (Jun 2023)
The next major nationwide protest is scheduled for April 19th. We should try to double the attendance & start targeting the news media. Rally or march past news outlets: New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Boston Globe, Fox, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC... Include the failing media in our signs.
We can expect nothing from the corporate media- any truth is to be found in either local news, left news, or news originating out of the US- The Guardian, Al Jezeera, BBC, CBC.