SOMERVILLE, MASS. (WHDH) - For the first time, members of Congress met with Rumeysa Ozturk, a 29-year-old PhD student at Tufts University being held in an ICE detention facility in Louisiana.
“She has suffered multiple asthma attacks,” said Senator Ed Markey. “They are not getting medical attention, which they need and deserve.”
Senator Markey, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, and Congressman Jim McGovern made the trip Tuesday, demanding answers and calling for Ozturk’s release.
“There are people who are incarcerated in detention centers, not because they committed any crime but because of what they believe, what they’ve written,” said Congressman McGovern.
Ozturk, a Turkish national, was arrested last month in Somerville by ICE agents. She was studying in the United States on a student visa.
“This is not immigration enforcement, this is stifling dissent. This is repression. This is authoritarianism in the Trump era and Rumeysa is the victim of it,” Markey said at Boston’s Logan International Airport Wednesday.
The Trump administration accuses her of supporting Hamas after she wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper, critical of Tufts’ response to the war in Gaza.
“Whether you agree with what Rumeysa Ozturk said, we must agree with her right to say it. We choose to stand with Rumeysa Ozturk and the rights we all share, and with a democratic America that we all still believe in,” Markey said.
Since then, Ozturk has been moved through several states. She remains in a federal detention facility in Louisiana.
“It was an honor and also our responsibility. It was essential that we go, not only to conduct oversight, but to bear witness,” Pressley said at Logan Airport. “I was there because I’m a human being who gives a damn about other human beings. This is unconscionable and unlawful.”
Markey said Ozturk described the Louisiana facility as unsanitary and overcrowded.
The delegation also visited Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate, who the Trump administration accuses of supporting Hamas.
Khalil’s wife, a U.S. citizen, gave birth to their first child just hours before the visit.
“He was deprived and denied his right as a civil detainee, as a human being, to be there for the birth of his son,” said Pressley.
Neither Khalil, nor Ozturk, have been charged with a crime.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the government has every right to revoke her visa.
“I don’t know what the hell has happened to Marco Rubio. He seems to have lost his conscience and sold his soul to Donald Trump. He has essentially become not secretary of state, but a thug,” McGovern said at Logan.
Lawmakers say both cases highlight concerns about legal access, medical care and constitutional rights, such as free speech.
“Both are being unlawfully detained in ICE facilities thousands of miles away from home, and denied the dignity, medical care, and due process they deserve,” said Pressley.
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