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rumeysa ozturk
Immigration Detention Is No Place for a Child
As I continue to heal from my own experience in a for-profit ICE prison, I can’t help but wonder if children detained will ever feel safe again.
Feb 25, 2026
Each day, I read more news about children as young as two years old who are detained in a for-profit Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Dilley, Texas, away from their friends, schools, and communities. I see reports of handwritten letters from children asking to be released, as they describe the fear they experience day in and day out while in detention. As an applied developmental scientist who spent more than 13 years studying child and youth development, as well as someone who has firsthand experienced the horrors of encountering immigration enforcement and the inhumane treatment and conditions that follow, I am deeply concerned for children impacted by immigration enforcement surges.
There is no shortage of research that demonstrates the connection between family detention and deportation proceedings of children and negative educational outcomes, elevated levels of distress, mental and physical harm, trauma, and decline in multiple aspects of well-being. Currently, approximately 1 in 12 children in the US face risk of deportation of a loved one and the lasting negative impacts on their psychological and physical well-being. ICE has detained at least 3,800 children since mid-January 2025. Of those 3,800 kids, more than 600 unaccompanied children have been put in custody of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and were taken from their parents in many cases.
Regardless of my role as researcher, on a human level I am constantly thinking: What do children feel when they first encounter immigration enforcement, who are usually armed and masked? Do their little bodies tremble or freeze? What happens when federal agents take their parents away from them? What does it mean for a preschooler to be detained? What is their crime? Is it being born or, perhaps, seeking asylum? What sense of childhood remains when immigrant children are detained in inhumane conditions?
What I experienced as an adult paints enough of a bleak picture. As a 30-year-old, I was unlawfully abducted from the street by masked and armed agents for being a co-author in a school op-ed at Tufts Daily that advocated for Palestinian human rights. I was sent to a for-profit ICE prison thousands of miles away from school and the community I’d built in Boston, not to mention thousands of miles away from my family in Turkey. The experience has been profoundly harmful to me, even as an adult. Despite the immense care, love, and support from my community, there has still not been a single day when I have felt safe walking the streets again—not even on my way home or to school. It’s not just the moment of abduction that is terrifying, but also where one will go and the inhumane treatment they may face that cannot be considered developmentally appropriate for any single child. Research suggests that interacting with the immigration system poses harm to children’s long-term development. Previous personal accounts indicate that suffering continues throughout the lifetime.
We must all ask ourselves: Is this really the world we want for our children—one where they are afraid to go to school, home, hospitals, neighborhoods, playgrounds, museums, and libraries for fear of immigration detention?
As I continue to heal from my own experience in a for-profit ICE prison, I can’t help but wonder if children detained will ever feel safe again. I worry about how they will grow up and carry this adverse experience for a lifetime. Interacting with immigration enforcement not only poses developmental risk to children detained in those shameful places for longer periods of time, but also to children (including citizen children) whose parents are detained at the for-profit ICE prisons. In the for-profit prison where I was unlawfully detained, I met countless mothers who cried everyday longing for their children. I met mothers in the deportation process whose hearts were shattered when their children were taken into foster care. I listened as some mothers tried to speak with their children on tablets, only to have officers order them to close the tablets or take them away, leaving their children in tears. I met mothers whose babies were taken from them just weeks after birth. I met with a pregnant mom waiting for her deportation. Her children are American citizens.
But these cruel immigration raids aren’t only harming immigrant children or children with immigrant parents. The experience also affects classmates who are waiting for their detained peers to return. These same children are trying to make sense of what they see on news reports of kids being detained, of disappearing classmates, students, and adults on the street during ICE raids. Children and their teachers are being taken from their communities, leaving classrooms and communities in fear. There are accounts of BIPOC and immigrant children being bullied at school.
We must all ask ourselves: Is this really the world we want for our children—one where they are afraid to go to school, home, hospitals, neighborhoods, playgrounds, museums, and libraries for fear of immigration detention?
I hope there is an end to family detention so that these parents and young children can proceed with their cases while living in their communities, going to school, getting medical treatment, and playing with their friends. Too many children are facing detention because of ICE’s rampant operations. But detention is no place for a child. It’s cruel and unnecessary. We can all take action, whether that means raising our voices to demand an end to child detention, or simply educating ourselves on how current immigration policies are impacting children.
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Judge Ends Öztürk Deportation Effort But Press Freedom Group Still 'Disgusted That It Ever Happened'
"They’d throw out all of us who dissent if they could," warned the Freedom of the Press Foundation's chief of advocacy.
Feb 10, 2026
An immigration judge has terminated the Trump administration's effort to deport Rümeysa Öztürk, a doctoral student at Tufts University, for criticizing Israel, her lawyers announced on Monday.
Öztürk, a 30-year-old Turkish national, was snatched off the street by masked US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Massachusetts last March and was flown to an unsanitary detention center in Louisiana, where she spent 45 days before a judge ordered her release on bail.
The US State Department had revoked Öztürk's visa, accusing her of "support for Hamas," a designated terrorist group, and creating a “hostile environment” for Jewish students.
That accusation was based solely on an opinion piece she'd co-written with other Tufts students calling for the university to divest assets from Israel over its genocide in Gaza, which had killed over 50,000 people at the time, according to official figures.
An internal memo relied upon by Secretary of State Marco Rubio provided no evidence that Öztürk had expressed support for terrorist groups or participated in any sort of antisemitic harassment.
Documents unsealed last month by a Massachusetts judge later revealed that Rubio had approved Öztürk and several other students' deportations based solely on their advocacy for Palestinian rights.
It was for this reason that an immigration judge, Roopal Patel, an employee of President Donald Trump's own Department of Justice (DOJ), ultimately found that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had not met its burden to prove Öztürk’s removability and ordered her case to be dropped.
“Today, I breathe a sigh of relief knowing that despite the justice system’s flaws, my case may give hope to those who have also been wronged by the US government,” Öztürk wrote in a statement Monday. “Though the pain that I and thousands of other women wrongfully imprisoned by ICE have faced cannot be undone, it is heartening to know that some justice can prevail after all.”
Many of the international students who were initially detained by ICE over their advocacy have since been freed after judges ruled their detentions unlawful. But they still spent weeks or months in detention in some cases.
Jessie Rossman, legal director at the ACLU of Massachusetts, added that the decision "underscores the importance of allowing federal courts to review challenges to immigration detention" because otherwise "the government could punitively and unlawfully detain any noncitizen for months based solely on their speech so long as it simultaneously began removal proceedings."
Seth Stern, the chief of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said his organization is "thrilled that the effort to deport Rümeysa Öztürk is over," but that they "remain alarmed and disgusted that it ever happened."
"Öztürk’s case is arguably the most blatant press freedom violation of this century, and maybe the last century as well," he said. "The administration did not even bother to present a pretext for its actions—it arrested her, jailed her in horrific conditions, and sought to expel her solely because she expressed views shared by millions of Americans about one of the most important issues of our time."
Chip Gibbons, policy director of Defending Rights & Dissent, noted that the Trump administration "continues to [Öztürk] as a terrorist," even though "her only 'crime' was using the First Amendment."
Stern said that “they went after noncitizens first, not because they have any greater appreciation of the First Amendment rights of citizens, but because they’re the low-hanging fruit. They’d throw out all of us who dissent if they could.”
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Rights Group Condemns 'Terror' and 'Lawlessness' Spread by Trump's Masked Thugs
“Allowing masked, unidentified agents to roam communities and apprehend people without identifying themselves erodes trusts in the rule of law and creates a dangerous vacuum where abuses can flourish."
Dec 18, 2025
As masked government agents—an oft-employed terror tool of authoritarian regimes—run roughshod amid the Trump administration's mass deportation effort, a leading human rights group on Thursday called on Congress to investigate abuses perpetrated by federal officers against immigrants and US citizens alike.
Federal immigration enforcement agents "now commonly operate masked and without visible identification, compounding the abusive and unaccountable nature of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign," Human Rights Watch (HRW) said. "The indefinite and widespread nature of these practices is fundamentally inconsistent with the United States’ obligations to ensure that law enforcement abuses are investigated and met with accountability."
HRW continued:
Since President Donald Trump’s return to office in January 2025, his administration has carried out an abusive campaign of immigration raids and arrests, primarily of people of color, across the country. Many of the raids target places where Latino people work, shop, eat, and live. The agents have seized people in courthouses and at regularly scheduled appointments with immigration officials, as well as in places of worship, schools, and other sensitive locations. Many raids have been marked by the sudden and unprovoked use of force without any justification, creating a climate of fear in many immigrant communities.
Drawing upon interviews with 18 people who were arrested or witnessed arrests by unidentified federal agents, HRW highlighted the "terror" and helplessness felt by victims of such "lawlessness."
“It was a horrible feeling,” said Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts University who was illegally snatched off a Massachusetts street in March and whisked off to an US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) lockup in Louisiana after she published an opinion piece in a student newspaper advocating divestment from apartheid Israel as it waged a genocidal war on Gaza. With Öztürk having committed no crime, a federal judge ordered her release 45 days later.
“I didn’t think that they were the police because I had never seen police approach and take someone away like this," Öztürk said of her arrest—which bystanders likened to a kidnapping. "I thought they were people who were doxing me, and I was genuinely very afraid for my safety... As a woman who’s traveled and lived alone in various countries for my studies, I’ve never experienced intense fear for my safety—until that moment.”
Operatives with ICE—part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—and other agencies have violently attacked not only unauthorized immigrants but also members of their communities including US citizens, activists, journalists, and others. The agents are often wearing masks but not badges or other identifiers, making it very difficult to hold abusers accountable.
While ICE tries to justify its widespread practice of masking agents “to prevent doxing,” HRW stressed that "this kind of generalized, blanket justification for concealing officers’ identity is not compatible with US human rights obligations, except when necessary and proportionate to address particular safety concerns."
"Anonymity also weakens deterrence, fosters conditions for impunity, and chills the exercise of rights," the group added.
It also sows terror, as Republican-appointed US District Judge William Young noted in a ruling earlier this year: "ICE goes masked for a single reason—to terrorize Americans into quiescence. Small wonder ICE often seems to need our respected military to guard them as they go about implementing our immigration laws. It should be noted that our troops do not ordinarily wear masks. Can you imagine a masked marine? It is a matter of honor—and honor still matters."
HRW also noted that "in recent months, media outlets have reported on people posing as federal agents kidnapping, sexually assaulting, and extorting victims, exploiting fears of immigration enforcement."
“Allowing masked, unidentified agents to roam communities and apprehend people without identifying themselves erodes trusts in the rule of law and creates a dangerous vacuum where abuses can flourish, exacerbating the unnecessary violence and brutality of the arrests,” HRW associate crisis and conflict director Belkis Wille said in a statement Thursday.
HRW called on Congress to "investigate the brutality of the ongoing immigration enforcement activities, including the specific impacts of unidentifiable agents carrying out stops and arrests on impeding investigations and accountability efforts."
In addition to efforts by state legislatures to unmask federal agents, congressional Democrats have demanded ICE and other officers identify themselves, and have introduced legislation—the No Secret Police Act and No Masks for ICE Act in the House and VISIBLE Act in the Senate—that would compel them to do so.
“If you uphold the peace of a democratic society, you should not be anonymous,” No Secret Police Act lead co-sponsor Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY) said at the time of the bill's introduction in June. “DHS and ICE agents wearing masks and hiding identification echoes the tactics of secret police authoritarian regimes—and deviates from the practices of local law enforcement, which contributes to confusion in communities.”
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