Rümeysa Öztürk appears with Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Ayanna Pressley after arriving in Boston, after her release from detention on May 10. Photo by Mel Musto/Getty Images

Senior Columnist Rob Eshman May 12, 2025

American Jews should breathe a sigh of relief — because Rümeysa Öztürk is free.

On Friday, Judge William K. Sessions, III ordered the immediate release of the Tufts graduate student, whom hooded, plain-clothed Immigration and Customs Enforcements agents grabbed off the street in late March and detained — all, apparently, because she co-authored an op-ed critical of Israel.

This is the part of my own op-ed where I’m supposed to acknowledge the scourge of antisemitism, and the fear and intimidation fomented by the campus anti-Israel protest movement. But by now, only suckers believe that these due process-free detentions under President Donald Trump’s administration have anything to do with fighting antisemitism.

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And as courts begin to order the release of students and recent graduates detained under that effort — including Öztürk and Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian-born activist whom a federal judge in Vermont ordered released from detention in early May — the bad faith and ulterior motives around which it has been shaped are only becoming more clear. When a judge chastises the federal government that “continued detention potentially chills the speech of the millions and millions of individuals in this country who are not citizens,” as Sessions said, it becomes that much harder to buy that these moves are intended to protect the civil rights and liberties of one group — rather than constrain those belonging to all of us.

Sending federal agents to disappear a hijab-wearing woman is no more about fighting antisemitism than is pulling university funding for bioscience research, or trying to take over college admissions, as the administration has done or threatened to do at Columbia, Harvard and other elite universities. Under the cover of fighting antisemitism, Trump has launched a ham-handed war against immigrants and higher education.

“There is no evidence here as to the motivation” of antisemitism, Sessions said, in ordering Öztürk’s release from detention, “absent the consideration of the op-ed.”

For weeks the government promised to produce evidence to back up its claims that Ozturk, a doctoral student, “engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization,” but failed to do so.

Who did show up in court? The 27 Jewish organizations and synagogues — including the liberal Zionist lobbying group JStreet and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association — who filed an amicus brief in support of Öztürk on April 27, just over a month after a video of Öztürk being detained went viral, shocking much of the country.

“The government,” they wrote, “appears to be exploiting Jewish Americans’ legitimate concerns about antisemitism as pretext for undermining core pillars of American democracy, the rule of law, and the fundamental rights of free speech and academic debate on which this nation was built.”

These groups aren’t speaking up because they necessarily agree politically with Öztürk, Mahdawi, or Mahmoud Khalil, whom ICE agents arrested in March and spirited away to detention center without due process. (Last week, a federal judge in New Jersey ordered the administration to provide legal precedent for Khalil’s deportation.)

They are speaking up because they understand that one day, it will be their turn.

I’m not sure why this is such a hard concept for Jews who still support the administration’s actions — or are silent in the face of them — to grasp. Once you strip away the protections afforded by due process and the First Amendment, or suspend habeas corpus on the pretext of a made-up emergency — as Trump aide Stephen Miller has recently suggested could and should be done — all of us with opinions, including, let’s face it, is most Jews, become vulnerable.

If some American Jews have forgotten this, at least some Israelis remember. More than 200 Israeli citizens affiliated with Columbia signed a letter in April calling for the release of Mahdawi, who they say actively sought dialogue with Israelis.

“We as Jews remember our history,” they wrote. “Our visas were revoked, we were detained, and we were deported. We know that we are more threatened under an authoritarian regime, and that our true safety lies in solidarity with other vulnerable groups. We will not allow our pain to be used to pursue an anti-democratic agenda.”

An anti-democratic agenda is not pro-Jewish, no matter who it purports to help. How imaginative do you have to be to look a few years into the future, when some new administration decides that those calling for the eradication of Gaza deserve the same punishment as those who called for the end of Israel?

Betar, the militant Zionist group that has supplied the administration with names of Mahdawi and other pro-Palestinian activists who the government later threatened with deportation, has tweeted in favor of killing more Gazan civilians — a tweet it later deleted — and forcibly removing Palestinians from Gaza.

Imagine if extremist rhetoric on that side of the political spectrum was subject to the same scrutiny as pro-Palestinian speech is today, and you’ll understand why those naming names through Betar should actually be grateful to Öztürk, Madawi, Khalil and others like them. They are being used to stress-test democracy, and, at least for now, showcasing its durability. They are taking the brunt of a reckless administration’s actions, and we are all discovering the strength of our judiciary to protect our basic freedoms.

When agents arrested Öztürk in Boston and spirited her away to a Louisiana jail, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas.”

But any pro-Israel Jew who applauded Rubio’s attempt at tough guy rhetoric then, or still supports it now, is forgetting: One day, one of those lunatics could be you.

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