Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University, who was detained by US immigration authorities in March over “antisemitism on campus”, has described the conditions in the detention facility as “inhumane” and “unsafe.”
Rumeysa Ozturk, 30, was arrested by US immigration and customs enforcement (ICE) agents near her home in Somerville, Massachusetts, on March 25. She was walking to meet friends to break her Ramadan fast when masked officers surrounded her. “I was speaking to my mother on the phone when several men approached me on the street and then surrounded me and I screamed,” she said in court filings, according to USA today.
Ozturk was taken without being allowed to call her lawyer. “They didn’t let me make any calls, and they asked me to put the phone into flight mode,” she said. “It was an isolated place with four men, and it was terrifying.”
Initially held in Vermont, Ozturk was transferred to a facility in Pine Prairie, Louisiana, against a judge’s order. There, she says conditions have been unbearable. “The conditions in the facility are very unsanitary, unsafe, and inhumane,” she said. “There is a mouse in our cell… They don’t give us adequate hygiene supplies.”

She also accused a nurse of forcibly removing her hijab. “She said, ‘You need to take that thing off your head’ and took off my hijab without asking my permission,” Ozturk said. She also reported asthma attacks and said medical staff offered little more than ibuprofen.
The department of homeland security claims Ozturk supported Hamas, a designated terrorist group, and said this justified her detention. But she has not been formally charged.
US district Judge William Sessions called her detention a “potential constitutional crisis” and questioned the legality of ICE’s actions. Ozturk says she only wants to return to her studies: “I pray every day for my release so I can go back to my home and community in Somerville.”
Ozturk was one of four students who wrote an op-ed in the campus newspaper, The Tufts Daily, last year criticising the university’s response to student activists demanding that Tufts “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide,” disclose its investments and divest from companies with ties to Israel.