No, People Aren’t Being ‘Kidnapped’ or ‘Disappeared’

By Rich Lowry

Sunday, March 30, 2025

 

When is a lawful arrest a kidnapping?

 

The detention of a Tufts graduate student by immigration agents went viral last week after it was caught on video.

 

The woman, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national, was approached by plainclothes, masked agents on a sidewalk near her apartment building in Somerville, Mass.

 

She was, understandably, confused and scared, especially by an agent’s initial approach, and the Left has called her detention a “disappearing,” “abduction,” or “kidnapping.”

 

Chris Hayes of MSNBC declared the arrest “as flatly authoritarian as anything we have ever seen in the United States,” making it apparently as bad as the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, the Trail of Tears, and chattel slavery.

 

In the video, which was captured by a bystander, the woman is approached by a man in a hoodie and baseball cap who obstructs her path and starts grabbing her wrists. We can’t hear what he’s saying, but she is clearly very frightened and doesn’t know what’s going on. One critique of the arrest is that she had no way of knowing that the plainclothes agents were legitimate authorities.

 

But, even if the first agent didn’t announce himself (he may well have and we just can’t hear it), a second agent with a badge around his neck quickly approaches. And then a female agent enters who tells Ozturk what is happening and repeatedly reassures her.

 

As she’s being cuffed and led to the waiting car, an agent can be heard saying, “I understand it’s scary.”

 

Why were the agents masked, which we aren’t used to seeing? Because DHS agents are being doxxed.

 

Why was she “snatched” off the sidewalk? Presumably the agents had an administrative warrant that didn’t provide for entry into her apartment.

 

And would that really be any better? Any arrest involves taking someone away against his or her will, which is always going to be, at the very least, unsettling for the arrestee.

 

Usually when we talk about a controversial arrest, it involves throwing someone to the ground or using some other force that is excessive or perceived as excessive. In this case, DHS agents might — I emphasize might — have better identified themselves at the very outset, but unquestionably behaved professionally and treated with respect someone who was stunned at what was happening to her.

 

Immediately, left-wing activists and commentators described her detention in terms that apply to an act of criminality, or the work of a dictatorial state that grabs people off the streets, puts hoods over their heads, and sends them to torture chambers.

 

Instead, the United States government, which has sovereign control of its borders and allows selected people, as a privilege, to come here on visas for a specific purpose, revoked her visa.

 

Ozturk isn’t “disappeared.” It’s true that she was walking to a meal at one moment, and then at another moment wasn’t — again, that’s inherent to any arrest. But after an initial period when her family and attorneys reportedly had trouble finding out where she was, everyone now knows that she is in a facility in Alexandria, La. We can assume she will have ample legal representation in a case that achieved instant notoriety.

 

It’s also important to acknowledge that, whatever happens, she’s not going to go to Leavenworth. The question is whether she’s staying here, or going home. As someone who believes this is the greatest country in the world, I can understand that being in the United States is preferable to being anywhere else, but there are much worse fates than to go home to live your life however you please (and agitate against Israel however you please).

 

That said, if Ozturk’s only offense was, as has been suggested in news accounts, co-authoring an anti-Israel op-ed, this case might be tougher for the administration than the Mahmoud Khalil case.

 

Since she hasn’t been abducted or disappeared, though, the process will work itself out under our laws.

 

The lurid terms applied to the case are another indication that the Left, at bottom, doesn’t accept that borders are legitimate and our nation gets to decide who comes here and who doesn’t in keeping with our national interests.