#SHARE THEIR STORIES by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

I was walking along the street the other day thinking about the comforts I find at home, my favorite tee-shirt, the three or four books I’m reading at a time, photos of loved ones. Around that time, I heard the news that Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts who was whisked off the street by ICE agents in Massachusetts. She disappeared into the system until she showed up in detention in Louisiana. This is the facility that has been called “a black hole” by civil rights groups. So many have been swept off the street, how do we keep track? Ozturk had a valid student visa until the State department revoked it without notice nor telling her. She was on her way to break her Ramadan fast with friends. After her arrest she asked for food, not having eaten for 13 hours. She was given snacks. She still hadn’t eaten a meal by the next day and was feeling faint. She was given more snacks.

I began thinking, who are her friends? What was she going to eat? In fact, what are her favorite foods? In other words, who is she as a person. Her name is foreign, she comes from another country so it might be too easy to dismiss her as one of many. But if we know her story, if we humanize her, her story becomes harder to dismiss. The first step in the authoritarian playbook is to dehumanize people for some feature of who they are. When someone is dehumanized, it is far easier to do hateful things.

The antidote is to know their stories, share their stories, speak their stories.

Here is what I could find out about Rümeysa Öztürk. She is 30 years old, a PhD candidate at Tufts in psychology with about 10 months before her dissertation. She earned a Masters Degree at Columbia as a Fulbright Scholar. She has a brother named Asim. Although the government hasn’t specified why she was detained, it is believed that is due to an editorial she co-wrote in the school’s newspaper in support of Palestinian children. She released a statement though her lawyer: “Efforts to target me because of my op-ed in the Tufts Daily calling for the equal dignity and humanity of all people will not deter me from my commitment to advocate for the rights of youth and children”

After her arrest more than 2,000 students protested at Tufts campus.

Here is more information about her from Wikipedia: One of Öztürks friends described her as “sweet, kind and gentle”, which, according to him, made her arrest by ICE more “shocking”. Her friend also stated that she was “soft spoken” and was never “discriminatory towards anyone”; he also said she had never heard her use swear words. Tufts University’s human development department posted a tribute to her after her arrest, describing Öztürk as a “valued member of our community” whose “genuineness and care for others have been felt deeply here at Tufts”.

You can read the University statement in support of Rümeysa Öztürk here.

The government has hit on a scheme to transport their detainees to various different facilities in different states. This has the effect of confusing issues of jurisdiction which allows them to keep people in detention for much longer as that issue has to be worked out before the main issues can even be looked at.

No where is this more apparent than the shipping of immigrants off to the infamous prison in El Salvador called Cecot. 

This is the situation with Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He is the 29-year-old father of three and protected legal resident who has lived in Maryland since 2011. He is married to Jennifer Vasquez Sura, a U.S. citizen. During a rally in Maryland she said, “To all the wives, mothers, children who also face this cruel separation, I stand with you in this bond of pain. It’s a journey that no one ever should ever have to suffer, a nightmare that feels endless.”

In a Kafka-esque move, the White House even admitted that he was deported in an administrative error.  He is originally from El Salvador and has protected status since 2019. It was determined by US courts that his life would be in danger from gangs should he ever return. The government is claiming he is a leader of an MS-13 gang but providing no proof.

Abrego Garcia has a permit from the Department of Homeland Security to work legally in the U.S., his attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg said. He served as a sheet metal apprentice and was pursuing his journeyman license.

Since his deportation it has come to light that many of the deportees sent to this prison have no criminal record. Perhaps some do but that is what due process and the courts are for, to sort that out. And even for those with some criminal record, it is inhumanely cruel to send them to a notorious prison in another country with no way out. We now have our own desaparecedos in this country. The United Nations considers the enforced disappearance of people to be a human rights violation. This is a modern-day concentration camp.

As the administration does in its dehumanizing efforts, Both Leavitt (press secretary) and Vance (VicePresident) have smeared him by saying he is not a “father of the year.” How dare they?

By disingenuously claiming that now that these people are no longer in US custody, there is no jurisdiction, they continue this ugly, cruel charade.

The lower court judges have seen right through this pretense of hustling people out of the country before anyone can assert their rights. It is obvious on its face that what the administration is doing is unconstitutional. So what did Trump do? He ran to his sugar daddy supreme court justices who after a delay offered mealy mouthed support for Garcia that allows for the administration to find loopholes to argue for not returning him. Apparently Trump has no “power” over the President of El Salvador who is claiming that Garcia will not be returned.

Who has the right to have rights. – Hannah Arendt

There are several photos of the detainees who are in all shaved, dressed in white, shackled and in submissive positions surrounded by black clad agents or guards who have their faces covered. Those photos should not be published. They are part of the publicity of this administration in their de-humanization project to make detainees faceless and helpless. To make the population fear them.  Let’s not buy into this. 

The anti-dote to their dehumanization project is to SHARE THEIR STORIES. To remind us all that human beings are involved, not just the individuals but the families, the community, all of us.  By my necessity of finding information I have written of the stories of those who are already in the news. How many others are there we don’t know but are equally interesting and equally innocent?

We need to #SHARE THEIR STORIES

Author’s update: Since I wrote this only a few days ago, things have grown even uglier. Rümeysa Öztürk reports that she is kept in unsanitary conditions. Twenty people sleep in a room that is meant for 14. Her asthma is not being treated properly and her hijab was removed without her permission. To confirm how disingenuous these actions are. She was arrested in Mass, moved to , New Hampshire, Vermont and then to Louisiana. Each time, and in each state, she asked to speak to her lawyer and was denied. The lawyers filed suit in the state she was arrested in, Mass. The government isn’t even arguing the merits of the case (ideas are not a crime). It is arguing that the case needs to be filed in Louisiana where she is detained.

Re: Kilmar Abrego Garcia, I am horrified by the moral repugnance and the corruption inherent when the leaders of two countries sit in a gold laden room and collaborate on ways to dehumanize the people they have turned their attentions to, picking on the most vulnerable to further their ambitions of power.

And one more thing: 19 year old Merwil Gutiérrez was arrested in the Bronx on Feb. 24. When the ICE agents took him, one of them said, “no he’s not the one we’re looking for.” Another one said, “take him anyway.” He is now in CECOT. Garcia is the headliner of this horrific action but there are many others that are wrongly imprisoned there as well.

#SHARE THEIR STORIES