We Visited Rumeysa Ozturk in Detention.

Opinion|We Visited Rumeysa Ozturk in Detention. What We Saw Was a Warning to Us All.

A young woman walked casually down a public street only to find herself suddenly surrounded by masked law enforcement officers in plain clothes. Without explanation — and in the absence of criminal charges and any due process — she was forced into a waiting vehicle and vanished into the labyrinth of the state security system.

Sound familiar? You’d be forgiven for thinking we’re recounting what happened to the Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk in Somerville, Mass., last month. But no: That was the September 2020 abduction of the political activist Maria Kolesnikova in the capital of Belarus, the former Soviet republic that is home to one of the most repressive governments in the world.

Disappearances like Ms. Kolesnikova’s are disturbingly common under authoritarian regimes where dissent is quashed and the rule of law is more fiction than fact. That a similar scene would unfold in Somerville in March 2025 as part of the Trump administration’s revived immigration crackdown should send a chill down the spine of every American.

We visited Ms. Ozturk earlier this week at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Basile, La., operated by the for-profit company Geo Secure Services, contracted by the federal government. It’s part of the network of ICE facilities in Louisiana that the American Civil Liberties Union has described as a “black hole” — hard to reach and isolated, making visits from lawyers and family members prohibitively difficult and expensive.

What we found was not just a young woman locked up without charge but also a democracy being put to the test. Ms. Ozturk is a graduate student, a writer and a community member who is in the United States legally on a student visa, which was revoked without apparent cause. She was walking to an Iftar dinner when federal agents, some of them masked, surrounded her, detained her, refused to explain why and then forcibly removed her to an undisclosed location; it took her family roughly 24 hours to even find out where she was being held.

When we met Ms. Ozturk in Basile, she told us she feared for her life when she was taken off the streets of her neighborhood, not knowing who had grabbed her or where they were taking her. She said that at each step of her transit — from Massachusetts to New Hampshire to Vermont to Louisiana — her repeated requests to contact her lawyer were denied. Inside the detention center, she was inadequately fed, kept in facilities with extremely cold temperatures and denied personal necessities and religious accommodations. She suffered asthma attacks for which she lacked her prescribed medication. Despite all this — and despite being far away from her loved ones — we were struck by her unwavering spirit.