It’s scary times we’re living in. With the recent win for President Trump in November of last year came a lot of fears expressed by a boatload of people. From women to racial groups and queer communities there has been an uproar of criticism and personal anxieties against the ruling administration.
The rise in right-wing popularity was not by chance but by design. Since Trump’s loss in 2020 against former president Biden, Trump has been campaigning his ideas and platforming his followers while doing it. His sphere of influence is growing bigger and bigger everyday, to trhe point that his actions are going unnoticed and unchecked. One including the unjust takeover of ICE and racist dehumanization of immigrants and people of color in our borders.
Rumeysa Ozturk, a 30-year-old Turkish PhD student at Tufts University, was taken into custody by six disguised federal agents wearing face masks and unsuspecting clothes. She was handcuffed, forced into a vehicle, and transported to a detention center in Louisiana—far from her family and lawyers.
What was her alleged offense? Co-authoring an opinion piece in a student newspaper urging Tufts to sever ties with Israel. Ozturk was in the U.S. legally on an F-1 student visa, exercising her right to free speech. However, the Trump administration revoked her visa and detained her without presenting any evidence of wrongdoing.
The U.S. Constitution guarantees protections for everyone within its borders, meaning deporting Ozturk solely for what she wrote in a paper would be unconstitutional. A judge even ordered that she remain in Massachusetts, yet she was moved without notice.
Ozturk is not the first person targeted for speaking out. This raises serious concerns—not just for immigrants but for anyone who criticizes the government. Today, it’s “Hamas sympathizers”, but who will be next?
Next it will be innocent migrants fleeing danger.
The Trump administration has admitted to mistakenly deporting Kilmar Arbrego Garcia, a legal U.S. resident, to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador—and now they say they can’t bring him back. In an official court filing, they called it an “administrative error.”
This is exactly why the Constitution exists. A judge had ruled that Trump was not allowed to send people to the prison known for food deprivation and torture without proving wrongdoing in court. But when a judge ordered Trump to stop the planes headed to El Salvador, he ignored it—and continues to do so.
Arbrego Garcia, who lived in Maryland with his wife and 5-year-old child, has no criminal record in the U.S. or El Salvador, according to his legal team. His wife only found out he was in the prison after spotting him in a photo of detainees. The Trump administration accused him of being a member of MS-13, despite having no evidence. In reality, he fled gang threats in El Salvador in 2011 as a 16 year old and was legally living in the U.S.
JD Vance defended the deportation, claiming on X that Arbrego Garcia had “no legal right to be here.” But even if he had entered the U.S. illegally—which he didn’t—his case would still need to go through a court of law, and a deportation to a mega-prison wouldn’t be warranted.
Arbrego Garcia’s case is one of many where people with no criminal record have been detained or deported without a trial, sometimes based only on something as trivial and stereotypical as tattoos. This is a serious constitutional crisis. The executive branch openly defying court orders is unconstitutional. Denying people their right to a fair trial is unconstitutional.
The scary thing is that he promised all of this and campaigned on it but still all of this begs the questions, if the government can grab anyone off the street and throw them into a foreign prison without due process, what kind of country are we living in? Will Trump be held accountable? Will this injustice be corrected? And what will he do next?
