Date: 2025-07-02 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00028321
TRUMP
STRATEGY OF 'DISAPPEARANCE'
TNR: We Were Warned ... The Biggest Scandal
of the Second Trump Term Isn’t “Signalgate”
STRATEGY OF 'DISAPPEARANCE'
TNR: We Were Warned ... The Biggest Scandal
of the Second Trump Term Isn’t “Signalgate”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump during
a Cabinet meeting earlier this week
Win McNamee/Getty Images
Original article: https://newrepublic.com/article/193291/trump-disappearing-students-rumeysa-ozturk-rubio-biggest-scandal
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
I am 85 years old. 65 years ago I was a college student at Cambridge in the UK.
The late 1950s were a time of considerable student unrest. We were opposed to nuclear war and the ever more powerful nuclear bombs that were being developed and the aircraft and missiles to deliver them. Students like me were protesting around the world, and especially in the UK.
During the Easter break, there was a 'march' from Aldermaston to Trafalgar Square in London, a distance of about 55 miles. Aldermaston was a military research establishment for nuclear bombs, and of course, Trafalgar Square was in the middle of London. This march had become an annual student event and gave rise to the CND symbol which later became the PEACE synbol now known universally around the world.
In the UK, when I was a student, there was a very clear unwitten line between what was 'allowed' as part of 'student protest' and 'free speech' and what was not allowed and would be stopped by the police and be prosecuted.
The idea that hundreds of thousands of students were allowed to demonstrate peacefully during a multi day march from Aldermaston to London could not happen in the United States of Trump in 2025 ... which I find a shocking situation and a complete abrogation of what I always thought of as American rights and values!
The 'freedom' I had as a student at Cambridge about 65 years ago was so much more than modern students seem to have in the United States now (2025). In all my time at Cambridge in the UK, I never saw a policeman on university or college grounds. There were 'proctors' ... employees of the colleges that walked around in the evening hours that could report misbehaving students to the college authorities, but they were more for 'show' than anything really serious!
This 'freedom' was extended to students who participated in the Alermaston marches. Police were present in order to handle traffic issues, to keep everyone safe and anable the right of 'free speech'.
I find the sight of police armed to the teeth in riot gear on the campus of Columbia University to be a sign of a failed American society more than anything else.
And the administrations push against international students is simply disgusting. The failure of 'ordinary' Americans to object is a massive failure and indicates the moral bankruptcy of the country.
Peter Burgess
Written by Alex Shephard
March 28, 2025
The national security chat debacle certainly merits attention. But the Trump administration is now blatantly disappearing students and others who are in the country legally.
On March 26, 2024, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish Ph.D. student at Tufts University, co-authored an op-ed criticizing the university’s response to student demands for divestment from Israel, which was published in its student newspaper. “Credible accusations against Israel include accounts of deliberate starvation and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide,” the authors wrote, referring to Israel’s disproportionate response to Hamas’s October 7 attacks. Aside from its focus on Tufts, a small private college outside Boston, it was hardly different from a lot of writing published in student newspapers across the country over the past two years—for that matter, it was little different from a lot of writing published in mainstream publications, including The New Republic.
On Tuesday, as captured on video, a half-dozen masked agents of the Department of Homeland Security ambushed Ozturk as she left her Somerville apartment to meet friends. She was surrounded, cuffed, led into an unmarked car, and driven away, apparently for the crime of having co-authored that op-ed. Despite a court order blocking authorities from removing her from Massachusetts without advance notice, she was flown to Louisiana—where many other visa holders like herself who have been critical of Israel are being held, such as Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil.
Masked agents snatching legal residents off the streets and disappearing them—not so long ago, this would be unthinkable in the United States. Now it is not only a regular occurrence but something that the Trump administration boasts about.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson claimed that Ozturk “engaged in activities in support of Hamas,” adding, “Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated.” But DHS has provided no evidence that Ozturk supported Hamas—indeed, the group is not mentioned in the offending op-ed. When asked Thursday about the student’s detention, Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismissed the uproar. “We revoked her visa … once you’ve lost your visa, you’re no longer legally in the United States,” he said. “If you come into the U.S. as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don’t want it. We don’t want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country.”
That was arguably not even the most chilling part of Rubio’s press conference. Rubio confirmed recent reporting that the U.S. State Department had revoked 300 student visas—most or all for criticizing Israel or protesting the war in Gaza—but then went further. “At some point, I hope we run out because we’ve gotten rid of all of them, but we’re looking every day for these lunatics that are tearing things up.” So you can expect this dragnet to get even worse.
Ozturk’s abduction by agents of the state occurred during what has thus far been the biggest scandal of Trump’s second term. The Beltway media calls it “Signalgate.” As you surely know by know—since the story has dominated the news for three days—the Trump national security team accidentally included Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg in a Signal group chat discussing precise plans to bomb Houthi rebels in Yemen. It’s an embarrassing scandal that captures the idiocy and incompetence of the Trump administration, which has foolishly given the story extra legs with a raft of silly deflections and obvious lies.
But the detention and attempted deportation of student activists on spurious grounds—and the use of armed, typically masked agents of the state to do so—perfectly captures the real, menacing story of the second Trump administration. There’s the tortured, spurious defenses of extralegal action; the foaming of the mouth over nonwhite immigrants and “woke” students at elite universities; the criminalization of free speech that runs contrary to that espoused by the MAGA right; and the blatant violation of people’s legal rights.
By removing the authors of innocuous op-eds, Rubio seems to believe that he can surgically smother the opinions they were expressing. At the same time, this purge allows the administration to systematically attack higher education. Already, the administration has used student protests to attack a number of colleges and universities and to withhold hundreds of millions in federal funding from several. Allegations of antisemitism—and a list of demands that are more or less impossible to fully meet—are being used as a Trojan horse to withhold funding and to attack other sources of revenue. Many schools rely heavily on foreign students, who often pay full tuition. The Trump administration’s crackdown, even if it were to somehow stop today, has already seriously jeopardized that. Who would send their child to study in America in such a climate? Especially knowing their child could be swept off the street and flown to a detention facility?
None of the students who have had their visas revoked have had anything resembling due process. None of them have been accused of crimes. Instead, they are being punished for speech that’s rightly outraged over Israel’s slaughter in Gaza. Yes, Ozturk’s case and others like it will eventually all play out in the courts. But people are being swept off the streets right now, every day, and being detained without legitimate cause. The administration is fast-forwarding to its desired conclusion and daring the courts to stop it, while also choosing which court orders to obey and which to defy. Even if the judiciary were somehow able to stop all of this, the chilling effect remains—which, after all, is the point.
When Rubio was nominated for his current role, there was a mild sense of surprise. The senator was seen as a moderating force, an establishment Republican expected to be more committed to foreign policy norms—and, for that matter, the rule of law—than the president’s other nominees. And this belief (or hope) was projected on him in the early days of the administration. As Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in the Oval Office last month, Rubio seemed to shrink into the furniture. Body language doctors on social media and cable news overlaid the image with the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme. Here, at least, was someone who saw what was happening around him for what it really was.
The situation looks rather different now. As my colleague Greg Sargent wrote recently, Rubio is perhaps Trump’s biggest enabler. And his feverish pursuit of legal immigrants and students, over speech he and his boss object to, is the administration’s most appalling act thus far. I shudder to imagine how much worse it will get.
Alex Shephard
Alex Shephard is senior editor of The New Republic, where he has covered politics and culture since 2015. His work has also appeared in New York, GQ, The Atlantic, The Nation, and other publications.