You are walking along a public street in daylight when suddenly you are surrounded by people dressed in black with masks on their faces who then handcuff you and take you away in unmarked vehicles to an unknown destination and not allowed to contact anyone. This is what happens routinely in authoritarian countries where the rule of law has broken down and death squads operate with impunity.
But this happened on Tuesday on the streets of a Boston suburb to a Fulbright graduate student from Turkey attending Tufts University.
Dramatic footage had emerged on Wednesday evening of the moment US immigration officials, wearing masks and hoodies, detained the Tufts University doctoral student in Massachusetts in the street, handcuffed her and bustled her into an unmarked car.
Ozturk was detained on Tuesday by federal immigration agents, and on Wednesday was being held at the South Louisiana Ice processing center, according to the government’s Ice detainee locator page.
The video, taken from a security camera on a building, shows Ozturk walking along the street when she is approached by several masked figures, who forcibly take her phone and backpack and place her in handcuffs. The officials, some with badges around their neck, all have their faces covered.
After she screams, an unseen onlooker can be heard responding.
“Is this a kidnapping?” asks the bystander, who appeared to be recording the arrest, footage that later circulated on social media.
In separate security-camera footage, the agents can be heard responding: “We’re the police.”
The bystander replies: “You don’t look like it. Why are you hiding your faces?”
Here is video of the event.
It looks like a police state because it is a police state. But where police can kill with the degree of impunity which has always obtained for many classes of victim in the USA, it’s only an intensification of the previous state of affairs. Which does not, of course, make that intensification any less horrible, or demand any less resistance to it.
Where were the good guys with guns?
Mano
Are you safe?
chigau (違う) @#3,
Thanks for the concern.
I don’t think that anybody in the US is safe these days from arbitrary arrest and detention without due process. The Trump gang seems to work on the principle of act now and don’t worry about the law or the constitution. But I am at the tail end of my life, where I do not have a career to worry about or anyone who depends upon me. That means I am at a stage where being abducted by secret police will not cause any tangible problems apart from physical discomfort. So I don’t worry about it and I will continue to write about the crimes of this administration.
“I don’t think that anybody in the US is safe these days from arbitrary arrest and detention without due process”
At the rate things are going, they’ll be herding you and others into gas chambers before the midterms, and i still expect the majority here will be ridiculing the idea of even *planning* how/when to gtfo.
I was going to say “stay safe”, but you’ve made it clear you’re not and don’t want to be. I’m struggling for a valediction in the circumstances.
I think if you see something like this or become targeted by it, call 911. I don’t know that it would stop it but I think the more pieces of the normal response to such things that gets involved, the more likely some impediment to their very illegal process will occur. At the very least it will create another chance for a later investigation to ask more people why they responded as they did.
And yes, I realize this is putting more faith in the same system that’s already failing you if this is happening at all. You work with what you have available and give yourself every chance you can.