We Study Repression in Turkey. Now We See It Here.
On Tuesday evening, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish Fulbright scholar researching children’s digital-media consumption at Tufts University, was taken into ICE custody. Ozturk was handcuffed and forced into a vehicle while on her way to dinner after fasting for Ramadan. In a video, she asks, “Can I call the police?” only to be told, “We are the police.”
Why was Rumeysa Ozturk seized like this? The Department of Homeland Security claimed that Ozturk had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization.” But it provided no further details, much less concrete evidence. Asked about her detention, Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained, “If you come into the U.S. as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don’t want it.” In the absence of actual charges, Ozturk’s purported crime appears to be an op-ed she co-wrote in March 2024. The article called on Tufts to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and “divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.” A prominent pro-Israel website featuring Ozturk’s photo later provided a link to that article as evidence of her “anti-Israeli activism.”
As Americans who follow Turkish politics closely, we have spent the past two decades decrying the rise of authoritarianism in Turkey. We have pointed to repeated crackdowns on free speech, including the regular use of security forces to arrest and intimidate students. So we watched with particular horror as our own government sent masked agents to arrest a Turkish student because of her political opinions.
[Conor Friedersdorf: Trump is deporting ‘them’ in ways that threaten us]
To anyone who has watched Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in action, all of this was far too familiar. For years the Turkish government has used “support for terrorism” as a sweeping charge to justify jailing its political enemies. Crucially, this support need not involve any action or association with an actual terrorist group. More often than not, it simply involves expressing an opinion critical of Erdoğan or his government.
What made this approach so effective was that Erdoğan usually focused on marginalized or unpopular groups. Because much of the public was hostile to these groups, mainstream politicians played along. Now, after a decade, Erdoğan has been emboldened to jail his main political rival and presidential contender on the same spurious charges. Turkish citizens have rallied in protest—but it may be too late.
Pro-Kurdish journalists and activists have long been a main target of Erdoğan’s terrorism charges. For decades, the PKK, designated a terrorist group by both the U.S. and Turkey, waged a brutal insurgency against the Turkish state. The widespread hatred this conflict generated in Turkey made it easy for Erdoğan to brand anyone who sympathizes with the Kurdish cause as a terrorist. This then helped him jail individuals who called attention to civilian casualties or who protested for peace.
Kurdish politicians faced a similar fate. The former Kurdish presidential candidate and party co-leader Selahattin Demirtaş has been jailed since 2016. More than 150 Kurdish mayors have been removed during this same period. The decades of stigmatization that Kurds have experienced as an ethnic minority help explain how the government gets away with repressing them. On top of this, pro-government media outlets depict oppositional Kurds as affiliated with the PKK whether or not they actually have ties to the group.
Individuals affiliated with, or accused of being affiliated with, the Fetullah Gulen religious movement have been targeted in the same way. In 2016, some of Gulen’s followers participated in a coup against the Turkish government, generating an angry backlash among Turkish citizens. Following this, Erdogan arrested not only anyone plausibly connected to the coup but also anyone he saw fit to charge with being connected, plausibly or not, with the entire Gulen movement. People who had attended the wrong high school, put money in the wrong bank, or gone to the wrong Quran-reading course were jailed as members of the “Fethullah Gulen Terror Organization.” The government used the chance to target its political enemies. In the case of one of our colleagues, the evidence presented for his Gulenist ties was a decorative bell with the word Pennsylvania on it—a supposedly clear reference to the state in which Gulen lived.
[Henri J. Barkey: Erdoğan’s war on truth]
Then, last week, Erdoğan arrested Ekrem İmamoğlu, the popular mayor of Istanbul. İmamoğlu was reelected by a wide margin last year, and was days away from a primary election that would anoint him the presidential challenger to Erdoğan. But after numerous failed moves to disqualify him from politics, the police detained İmamoğlu on corruption and terrorism charges. He remains in jail, while his supporters are out on the street protesting this blatant subversion of democracy. Not surprisingly, Erdoğan has accused them, and their lawyers, of being terrorists as well.
The Trump administration, like Erdoğan’s government, has started its consolidation of power by going after minorities with dissenting opinions. Like Kurds or Gulenists in Turkey, Muslim and nonwhite students without citizenship make for easy targets in America. Before Ozturk, ICE targeted Columbia’s Mahmoud Khalil and Yunseo Chung in New York. The only evidence presented against them was their role in protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. For too many American commentators and politicians, that was reason enough. And, in the absence of firm political and popular pushback, the number of students suffering similar treatment is growing. The University of Alabama student and Iranian national Alireza Doroudi, seized the same day as Ozturk, remains in ICE custody without a clear explanation.
In arresting his political enemies, Erdoğan counted on the support of mainstream Turks who hated the PKK and Fetullah Gulen more than they cared about the rule of law. Likewise, in arresting student activists, Trump is counting on the support of mainstream Americans who hate Hamas more than they respect the Constitution. So far, Erdoğan seems to have calculated correctly, and he has reaped the benefits. If Americans remain silent in the face of mounting detentions, they will ensure that Trump does as well.