We are in a very dark place as the Trump administration targets the First Amendment

My ethics and diversity class on Wednesday was devoted to a brief overview of First Amendment law. The class comprises nine graduate students and advanced undergrads, and they have shown throughout the semester that they are engaged and compassionate young people.

I began with a video in the news. You’ve probably seen it. It shows black-clad, masked thugs, apparently with ICE, approaching a young woman on a sidewalk at Tufts University, hauling her off to a van and driving her away. Her name is Rumeysa Ozturk, and she’s a Ph.D. student and a Turkish citizen who’s in the U.S. on a student visa.

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It’s the latest shocking image in a series of shocking images we’ve been subjected to recently as the Trump administration — my friend Adam Gaffin of Universal Hub has simply taken to calling it “the regime” — tracks down international students who have been involved in some form of pro-Palestinian activism and targets them for deportation.

The only activity I have seen attributed to Ozturk that might have led to her being targeted is an op-ed she helped write calling on the university to recognize Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocide” and to divest from Israel. You may agree or disagree; I mostly disagree, though I am appalled by the brutal manner in which Israel’s Netanyahu government has pursued its war against the terrorists of Oct. 7, 2023. But the First Amendment gives Ozturk an absolute right to speak and write freely, regardless of whether she’s a citizen.

According to accounts in The Tufts Daily student newspaper and Cambridge Day, thousands of protesters gathered in Somerville Wednesday night to show their support for Ozturk.

Cambridge Day reporter Jodi Hilton quoted Asli Memisoglu, a native of Turkey who graduated from Tufts in 1987, as saying: “One thing I’ve always cherished was the sanctity of free speech, but that’s threatened now.”

In The Tufts Daily, Emily Isaac, a Somerville resident, said: “People are always going to fight back. Everyone likes to say what they would have done during a historical atrocity, or during times of fascism, and I think it’s important to recognize the signs of when it’s happening.”

I wish I could say that Isaac was overstating matters.

Since Trump began his second term on Jan. 21, authoritarianism has descended upon us swiftly and mercilessly. Universities, law firms and public media organizations have all been targeted, and the people who are running them don’t know whether they should fight, surrender or find some sort of middle ground. Immigrants are whisked off to hellish prisons in El Salvador on the flimsiest of pretexes. Our country is quickly becoming unrecognizable.

On Threads last night, I saw a comment from someone who is definitely not a Trumper that, well, this is what people voted for. My response: Democracy without protection for individual rights is just another word for dictatorship.

We are in very bad shape, and the courts can only do so much.