ICE Jailed a Student for an Op-Ed, Now She’s Left America

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Question Everything

Episode: ICE Jailed a Student for an Op-Ed, Now She’s Left America
Host: Brian Reed
Date: April 30, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode examines the chilling saga of Dr. Ramesa Ozturk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts University who was arrested by ICE for co-authoring a pro-Palestinian op-ed. Through a live event at Tufts featuring journalists, lawyers, and student editors, the episode interrogates the moral and legal implications of government retaliation against campus speech, the dangerous precedent it sets for the First Amendment, and the profound ripple effects on student journalism and academic freedom across the nation.

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Key Themes & Discussion Points

1. The Arrest and Journey of Ramesa Ozturk

• Background: Dr. Ozturk advocated for Palestinian rights in a Tufts Daily op-ed, leading to ICE arrest and 45 days in detention.
• Event Timeline:
  • Arrested by masked ICE agents (03/25/2025) while walking near Tufts, held in Louisiana’s “black hole” detention center without charge.
  • Released after 45 days; the Trump administration pursued deportation and even fired the immigration judge who sided with her.
  • Ultimately settled her lawsuits with the government and left the US for Turkey upon completing her doctoral degree in 2026.
• Quote:
  • “Just being able to leave in a safe way was really important to us” – Dr. Ozturk’s associate ([02:50])

2. Chilling Effect on Campus Speech and Journalism

• National Fallout: Surge in student journalists and international students requesting removal of previously published content, specifically related to Palestine or anti-Trump viewpoints.
• Statistics:
  • Student Press Law Center hotline had its busiest week ever, with calls up nearly 40% year-over-year ([10:26]).
• Quote:
  • “The detention of Ramesa Ozturk was a watershed moment.” – Mike Heastand, Student Press Law Center ([10:26])
• Cases Beyond Tufts: After Ozturk’s arrest, numerous student newspapers—including at Yale—began fielding requests to erase published work for fear of state retaliation and deportation ([08:29]-[09:15]).

3. Legal Analysis and Government Tactics

• Due Process Undermined:
  • Ozturk’s visa was retroactively canceled without notice; government exploited immigration loopholes to justify her detention ([15:32]-[18:15]).
  • Deliberate confusion over detention location and jurisdiction stymied habeas petitions and delayed legal relief.
• Quote:
  • “Delay is this tactic...as a way to prevent people from getting justice in this country.” – Carol Rose, ACLU ([21:51])
• Broader Legal Battle:
  • Government’s arguments: visa law (Immigration and Nationalization Act) can override First Amendment protections for non-citizens.
  • Lawyers and courts contesting this, pointing out historical precedent that constitutional rights apply to everyone in the US, regardless of status ([33:00]-[33:56]).

4. Institutional Responses & Student Vulnerability

• Targeting International Students:
  • U.S. government leveraging student visa status to suppress speech by those most legally vulnerable ([32:19]).
  • Attorneys are now forced to advise caution or silence, a shift from longstanding First Amendment advocacy ([28:22]-[29:52]).
• Quote:
  • “We’re beyond chilling now. We’re frozen. We’re absolutely frozen.” – Rob Bertschi, First Amendment lawyer ([30:03])
  • “We can’t leave it to the international students either, because they’re the ones who are most in peril about speaking out.” – Rob Bertschi ([39:38])

5. Effects on Newsroom Decisions and Student Policy

• Retraction Dilemmas:
  • Surge in take-down requests for published student op-eds; traditional journalistic resistance is softening in the face of safety concerns and exposure of sensitive data ([64:55]-[69:41]).
  • Policies are evolving: more editors and advocacy groups now weigh potential harm alongside the imperative to preserve historical record.
• Transparency & Uncertainty:
  • Student editors admit policies are in flux and cases handled individually; Tufts Daily reports 10+ takedown requests since Ozturk’s arrest ([71:25]-[71:50]).
  • “The situation is changing with every day. …We’re slowly figuring it out.” – Argia Talipragada, Editor-in-Chief, Tufts Daily ([72:06])

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Government Retaliation:
  • “What does it say about the current administration that they just couldn’t stomach the fact that she coauthored an op-ed critical of Israel...?” – Brian Reed ([03:58])
• Government Justification:
  • “We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses.” – Secretary of State Marco Rubio ([24:15])
• On Comparing Past Precedent:
  • “This country was built on creating a ruckus, and that’s what the First Amendment is about – your right to create a ruckus.” – Rob Bertschi ([27:36])

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Expert Insights & Advice to Students

Marty Baron (Washington Post, Boston Globe)

• Historical Parallels:
  • Compares Ozturk’s experience to the imprisonment of Jason Rezaian in Iran and the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, underscoring the danger of unchallenged state power.
  • “Preposterous allegations being made by a government. You would hope our government would be better than that…” ([60:05])
• Advice to Young Journalists:
  • “If you don’t say it, you’re giving in to the pressure… The right to free expression means absolutely nothing if it’s not exercised.” ([72:49])

Akela Lacy (The Intercept)

• On Chilling and Backfiring:
  • “While people are afraid, it’s actually making it harder for the administration to keep this up… They’re only strengthening the backlash.” ([50:38])
• Risk Calculation:
  • Encourages thoughtful, individualized conversations around harm minimization and policy as journalists navigate an increasingly adversarial landscape ([68:46]).

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:35 – 02:50: Where is Dr. Ozturk now?—Update on her return to Turkey and settlement with the government
• 08:29 – 12:11: Voices from Yale, Student Press Law Center, reporting on chilling effects
• 14:33 – 23:55: Legal panel: Details of Ozturk’s detention, op-ed as grounds for arrest
• 24:15: Rubio’s justification (video clip)
• 27:36 – 33:03: First Amendment experts on legality, constitutionality, and the abuse of visa powers
• 36:27 – 39:54: Broader motivations, creeping authoritarianism, call to action
• 47:06 – 52:22: Student journalists and national reporters discuss editorial impacts, specific cases at other schools
• 55:48 – 64:55: Marty Baron draws from personal experiences with government retaliation and international press freedom cases
• 64:55 – 69:47: The ethics and policy of article takedowns, harm minimization vs. historical record
• 72:33 – 81:07: Advice for students, questions about personal risk, self-censorship, and principle

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Memorable Closing Words

“I believe the world is a more beautiful and peaceful place when we listen to each other and allow different perspectives to be in the room. Writing is one of the most peaceful ways of addressing systemic inequality. Efforts to target me... will not deter me from my commitment to advocate for the rights of youth and children.”
– Dr. Ramesa Ozturk, statement from detention ([81:07])

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Takeaways

• The ICE detention of a student journalist for nonviolent writing constitutes a seismic threat to free speech—especially for noncitizens—on college campuses nationwide.
• Legal experts warn that executive overreach and intimidation are shifting the boundaries of the First Amendment via administrative mechanisms like visa revocation.
• Student journalists and newsrooms are forced to weigh the risks of archiving versus erasing articles, marking a dramatic change in consensus around digital history and journalistic ethics.
• Courage in journalism and public protest is vital, but so is awareness of one’s own vulnerability; all panelists urge solidarity and vigilance as attacks on press freedom signal wider authoritarian dangers for all.

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Transcript

[Brian Reed]

Something I'm always thinking about is the way that algorithms are often self reinforcing, giving us more of the content and news that we want to see, which isn't the most healthy way to take in information. Which is why I'm excited to be partnering with Ground News. Ground News shows you how the same story is being covered across the political spectrum so you can actually get the full picture and not just the one version that's being given to you. If you want to check it out, go to groundnews.com? to get 40% off their unlimited vantage plan. Again, again, that's groundnews.com? make sure you use our link so they know we sent you. So where is Dr. Ozturk now?

[Unidentified Associate or Colleague]

She's in Turkey with her parents.

[Brian Reed]

And how's she doing?

[Unidentified Associate or Colleague]

I believe she's doing good. She's acclimating to being back home.

[Brian Reed]

Ramesa Ozturk, The Tufts University PhD student who was arrested by ICE last spring because she'd co authored an op ed in the student newspaper advocating for Palestinian rights. We learned last week that she decided to leave the US and has moved back to Turkey. She completed her degree in child study and Human development, so she is now Dr. Ozturk. Shortly after Dr. Ozturk was apprehended last March by masked ICE agents in plain clothes while she was walking down a street near Tufts, our team here at Question Everything worked with the undergrads at the student newspaper that had published Ozturk's op ed the Tufts Daily, to hold a live summit on campus. It was exactly a year ago this week, actually. Ozturk was being held in a Louisiana detention center with no charge at that time, and her case was drawing national condemnation. Remember, this was early on in the second Trump administration, when it was still new to see masked ICE agents tackling and snatching people off the streets in broad daylight. Oesturk's lawyers were fighting desperately to get her out of detention. Finally, on May 9th of last year, she was released after being held for 45 days. Since then, she's been finishing her doctorate while batting back efforts from the US Government to deport her. The government went so far as to recently fire an immigration judge that had ruled in Oesterk's favor. And one of her attorneys, Naz Ahmed from CUNY's Clear Project, told me, Once Dr. Ozturk got her degree in February, she decided she was done with America.

[Unidentified Associate or Colleague]

She thought about where she wanted to pursue her studies, where she wanted to pursue her writing, and she came to the decision that she didn't want to stay here to do that.

[Brian Reed]

Oesturk ended up coming to a settlement with the Trump administration where the government is agreeing to tie up her legal loose ends. She is dropping her lawsuits against them, including one for violating her First Amendment rights, and she's left the country. Dr. Ozturk isn't doing interviews at the moment, but in a statement she said that she's returning home on her own timeline. She didn't need to settle with the administration to do that to be able to go home. But in her statement, she said this will prevent her from losing more time to the state imposed violence and hostility she said she experienced in the US

[Unidentified Associate or Colleague]

Just being able to leave in a safe way was really important to us. We're doing this in a step by step way and the government knows it's happening and they're not taking steps at the airport, for example, to prevent her from leaving or something like that.

[Brian Reed]

So even though the government is ostensibly saying, we want you out of the country, she could have gone to leave the country of her own volition and they might have stopped her at the airport. That's conceivable.

[Unidentified Associate or Colleague]

Or just harassed her at the airport or something like that. Or treated her in a way that we didn't want her to be treated. She wanted to leave and she wanted to do it in a way that was as protective as possible. You can imagine that anybody in her situation or a similar situation could be concerned about if they've already been kidnapped off the streets of wherever they live and put in detention, and then they're going to leave the country and they're doing it at a time when, theoretically, ICE is stationed at the airports they might have about what's going to happen to them there. And I'm not saying that's necessarily how Ramesa felt, but you can imagine that somebody similarly situated could have concerns about that.

[Brian Reed]

What does it say about the current administration that they just couldn't stomach the fact that she co authored an op ed that was critical of Israel Pro Palestine. It just seems really pathetic that they'd have to go through all this trouble to go after a grad student for that.

[Unidentified Associate or Colleague]

It is really, honestly, quite pathetic.

[Brian Reed]

Because Romeza Oz Turk's ordeal appears to have come to an end, and because coincidentally, the episode we released a year ago while she was behind bars just won a Webby Award for best news and politics podcast episode, we've decided to share it with you again. Though, frankly, more than either of those reasons, the real value to listening to this conversation, I find, is to think about all that's happened in the years since, all the ways that the US Government has been trying to retaliate against people who are saying and reporting things that officials don't like, First Amendment be damned. And how the fear of the government arresting you, threatening you with deportation is enough to make people censor themselves. That is the very disturbing legacy of Ramessa Ozturk's story. In fact, there's now an active lawsuit from the student newspaper at Stanford against Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in large part because of the chilling effect of Ozturk's arrest. The Tufts Daily filed a supporting brief in the case, along with 50 other student newsrooms. But as you'll hear in this discussion, especially in the second half, where the student editors from the Tufts Daily got to ask advice from legendary Washington Post editor Marty Baron, these knock on effects were just becoming clear. So here it is, our live event at Tufts University about Ramesa Ozturk from a year ago this week. Welcome everybody. A little more than a month ago, on March 25, about a 10 minute walk from this auditorium, we're here on tufts campus. Tufts PhD student Rumesa Ozturk was apprehended by a group of ICE agents while walking down the street talking to her mom on the phone. There's video of this taken from a neighbor's security camera. Ramesa was handcuffed, put on a plane to Louisiana, and locked up in an ICE facility there in the month. Plus that she's been held. She has not been charged with any crime. The only obvious reason that the US Government has done this to Ramesa is because of an op ed that she co authored with three other graduate students last year in the Tufts Daily, the student newspaper here urging Tufts to heed resolutions that had passed the student senate, which demanded that the university acknowledge the Palestinian genocide and divest from companies with ties to Israel. In other words, right now a Tufts student is being imprisoned by the US Government because of her journalism. My name is Brian Reed. I host a podcast called Question Everything from KCRW and Placement Theory, where we try to confront the most challenging questions facing journalism. And as my colleagues and I have tracked what happened to Ramesa Oz Turk, we're convinced that Tufts is ground zero for arguably the most important story in journalism right now. This country was founded on strong protections for freedom of the press. No one here is supposed to be retaliated against by the government for doing journalism, for voicing opinions, for speaking their mind, not to mention lose their freedom because of it or their right to be here. And I have to say that if the government's goal here is to scare people, to silence opinions it doesn't like and quash dissent about U.S. foreign policy, about Israel's actions in Gaza, then there's evidence that it is working and that it's working well beyond Tufts. The other day I read a column in the Yale Daily News by their outgoing opinion editor, Milan Singh, expressing his concerns about the way the US Government is suppressing student speech. And he mentioned in the column that since Rumesa Osterk was abducted here at Tufts, he at Yale had been getting requests from international students and alumni to remove columns they'd already published in the Yale Daily News. Millen told me he's holed up in the library right now studying for finals this week. So he wasn't available to talk on the phone, but he and I have been sending voice memos to each other. Let's listen. This is Brian Reed, voice memoing you from Question everything. I know you're in the library studying. I just was interested about that partner column where you said that you got a bunch of requests from current international students and alumni to, it sounds like, scrub their previous articles and columns from the Yale Daily News site. I was just wondering if you could say any more about that. And he sent me a voice memo back.

[Milan Singh]

Brian. So I received a total of about four to five emails. The tone of all these emails were pretty worried. Some students didn't explicitly mention deportation, but only mentioned being on visa. Some did explicitly mention deportation or immigration status fears. It was palpable that they were worried. All but one of the articles they were concerned about was about Palestine or were about Palestine. And one of the articles they were worried about was just a generic anti Trump piece.

[Brian Reed]

Thank you, I appreciate it. I'm just curious, have you had an experience where you've tried to commission pieces or found that people are afraid of writing something in the first place? Now, are you noticing the chilling effect in other ways?

[Milan Singh]

Yeah, we have had some chilling effect on speech. One of the students, current student, has not submitted anything since they requested, and I imagine that's out of fear of it affecting their immigration status.

[Brian Reed]

I'm not sure what was going on there in the library, but he says that one of the students he was writing with hasn't submitted any new columns or writing to the paper since the student requested that their past piece be taken down. The chilling effects way bigger than I even imagined. After we started promoting this event just a few days ago, we got an email from a place called the Student Press Law center, which is an organization that gives legal help and other support to student journalists. And they wanted to let us know that after Ramazo's Turks apprehension, they started getting a flood of student journalists from around the country calling or writing into a hotline that they have, asking for advice about what to do in the wake of it. They, The SPLC hotline recently had their busiest week on record. Calls have been up by nearly 40% from this time last year. They told us, quote, the detention of Ramesa Oesterk was a watershed moment.

[Mike Heastand]

It definitely was. You know, after the arrest of Ramesa at Tufts that, you know, I think the alarm bells really started going off and people said, what's going on?

[Brian Reed]

This is Mike Heastand. He's been a lawyer at the Student Press legal Center for 34 years. I just talked to him as I was hustling over to this event, like, an hour and a half, two hours ago.

[Mike Heastand]

And particularly as it turned out, you know, that it became clear that the only reason that she was detained and, you know, has undergone, all that she's undergone here is because of what she published in the op ed. And, you know, for. If anybody has not read the op ed that. That, you know, that led to all this, they need to do so because it is the sort of op ed that students have been, you know, running for years and years. I remember back in the 80s when I was a student journalist, you know, our student newspaper was calling on our school to divest from investments in South Africa. So this is nothing new. I mean, it was 100% fully protected speech, at least under the old rules.

[Brian Reed]

Taking down stories from the Internet, from publication websites like Milan over at Yale. Mike also says that's what he's hearing on these calls. It's the biggest thing that student journalists are calling in about now that the government's been going after international students.

[Mike Heastand]

People just asking about, hey, you know, people are asking me to, you know, take down stories that they were sourced in or, you know, again, some cases, you know, worried about some of their staff that were international students. Or I even heard from international students themselves who are concerned about this. Those are the calls that we were getting. Should we take it down? Do we need to take it down?

[Brian Reed]

How does it feel for you to

[Marty Baron]

be kind of inundated with these questions

[Milan Singh]

after doing this for so long, three

[Mike Heastand]

decades, it blows my mind that I'm having to. I mean, it really is just something that I never would have anticipated. We'd even, you know, have to be talking about that, you know, we'd be worried about, you know, if you call on your university to divest of a particular investment, that's going to be enough to completely upend your life, you know, to have you, you know, taken off city streets and thrown in some detention facility. And in Louisiana, it's just, it's just insane. So I think just like everybody, we are just trying to, you know, figure out what's going on and react the best way that we can. While continuing to do the job today

[Brian Reed]

for Question Everything, we've been working with the wonderful staff of the Tufts Daily to pull together this event where we have student journalists, professional journalists, attorneys, and we're kind of thinking of this as a strategy session to figure out what can we do right now while Romeza Ozturk is being held and what can we do to try and thaw or at least stop a bit of this chilling effect while keeping people safe. What should we do at this unprecedented moment in our country? I've been doing an update of my wardrobe lately for the spring and the summer and I've been turning to Quince to do that. They have simple, comfortable, easy, good looking clothes and everything's a lot more affordable than similar brands, up to 80% less. I just got this matching chambray striped linen set, pants and shirt. I've noticed it's particularly lightweight, breathable. It's kind of like pajamas. But I can also wear it out, which is amazing. And I was wearing it around the house and both my wife and her friend who both work in the fashion industry said, I legitimately love this. This looks great on you. They were really into it, which made me feel great. Refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use head to quince.com? for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada too. That's quinceq u I-n c e.com? for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com?. Let's get right to it. I want to invite Elora Onion Day on stage from the Tufts Daily.

[Carol Rose]

Hi.

[Brian Reed]

Elora helps run the Daily as an associate editor and a member of their managing board. You're a sophomore, right? Studying international relations from Brooklyn. And Elora's going to take it from here and introduce our first couple of guests.

[Moderator or Event Host]

Hi everyone. I'd love to introduce our first two panelists. We have Robert Burchie, a First Amendment lawyer based here in Boston and he has decades of experience working with college newspapers and and has provided advice to the Tufts Daily. We also have Carol Rose, the executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, and she is part of the team representing Rumesa right now. Thank you. Carol. My first question is for you. I'm wondering if you could take us through what has happened to Rumesa and tell us what was most unsettling for you as you learned of it.

[Carol Rose]

Right. Thank you. First, I just want to say what an honor it is to be here, and especially with the Tufts Daily, where it's sort of been ground zero for a lot of what we're going to be talking about today and the courage that all of you show and every journalist out there and would be journalist. I want to say thank you because it's so important that the force of state stay vibrant and robust in our democracy. What happened is actually five days before Ramesa was picked up, the government went in and actually canceled her visa without telling her. They've subsequently tried to use the fact that her visa is not valid as the reason to imprison her, which is nuts, because she had a valid student visa. There was no reason to remove that, as we've seen from the video. I hope we can see that video. Ramesa was walking home. She was gonna have iftar with her family or their friends, her community here, talking to her mom on the phone, and then suddenly, she was surrounded by six plainclothes people.

[Brian Reed]

We have the video right here, Carol.

[Carol Rose]

Yeah, that's great. And I encourage everybody to see that video and to compare that to the op ed that we just talked about, people reading. And you can see this incredible difference between what she wrote, which was incredibly reasoned and peaceful, and then what happened to her on the street. So she was surrounded. She thought she was being kidnapped. She didn't know who they were. They were plain clothes. And then they handcuffed her, they shackled her, and they put her in an unmarked car, and they took her away. So she told her mom, like, call my friend. And the friend knew enough to call Rameses, Immigration attorney who's been amazing on this case. And that attorney contacted the ACLU because we have a rapid response for what's called habeas petitions. And so that's in the constitutional law. You file a habeas petition. Habeas corpus, it means produce the body. Right? So that's the basic, fundamental legal constitutional right that says that our government isn't supposed to do what they did to Rumesa and just lock you up for no reason and throw away the key. So we filed the habeas petition right away, the same night, and we couldn't find her for 24 hours. Nobody knew where she was. Her attorney didn't know. Her friends didn't know. We didn't know. We tried going to the U.S. attorney's office to get help. We tried going to the Turkish consulate to get help to try to just find her. There was this amazingly frightening dash to try to find. We found her on an ICE tracking website.

[Brian Reed]

Carol, at that point, did you even know. Know which agency had apprehended her?

[Carol Rose]

No.

[Brian Reed]

So did you know that it was an agency? Like, what did you know or what did you think at that point of period of uncertainty, I guess.

[Carol Rose]

Right. All we knew was that she'd been picked up and somebody had flashed a badge. And so.

[Brian Reed]

But it could have been like Boston PD or it could have been anybody.

[Carol Rose]

Right? So we found her on an ICE tracker, but without a location. So we, at that point, we were able to determine that she had been picked up by ice, but we didn't know where she was. And so we filed the habeas petition in Massachusetts because that's where she had been picked up. What was happening to her, though, is they drove her around hopscotching around New England. So they took her up to Methuen, and then they went up to New Hampshire, and then they went over to Vermont. And so at the time we filed, which is 10:15pm she was in a van in Vermont. And that's really important about where the location is because that's where the habeas petition is supposed to be filed. But before we could find out where she was, they had shipped her 1300 miles away down to a really notorious. What's called the Black Hole site down in Louisiana. And that's where she is still today.

[Brian Reed]

Where does that name come from?

[Carol Rose]

The Black Hole name comes from a report that the ACLU of Louisiana did. Looking at the various detention centers, there's 7,000 people being held. The only state that has more is Texas. So being held down there without due process. So we went into court and we said she should be returned. We filed this writ of habeas corpus and said, bring her back. And the government began to fight us about it right away. And so we've been caught up in a jurisdictional battle. So the government initially said, well, she doesn't belong in Massachusetts because she didn't file the habeas in Massachusetts. And so you have to bring the habeas down in Louisiana or throw it out altogether. And the Louisiana courts aren't going to be friendly at all. We know that. And that's why they took her down there. They didn't want to have a fair hearing. We argued that she should either be brought back to Massachusetts or brought to Vermont, because that's where she was when we filed the habeas petition. And so. And the same thing happened in the Mahmoud Khalil case when he was picked up in New York, and then they shipped him out and they filed the habeas petition in New York, but he was in New Jersey at the time.

[Brian Reed]

The Columbia Mahmoud Khalil, a protester at Columbia who's also been detained.

[Carol Rose]

He's also been detained without charge, correct? Without similarly also being held. So in both of those instances, the courts have ruled, the federal district court, which is your trial court level, they ruled that the jurisdiction should be in Vermont for Ramesa and in New Jersey, Vermont and Khalil, because that's the appropriate place where they were physically when the petition was filed. So that's what we've been fighting over, is literally like, where should she be brought? So just last week, the government, the district court in Vermont, ruled that, in fact, she should be brought back to Vermont and ordered that she be brought back to Vermont by Thursday, May 1, and that there'll be a bail hearing on the 9th. The government has appealed that to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeal, which is in New York. And the 2nd Circuit has now yesterday, last night, issued an order that says, okay, we're going to press pause so that we can have time to consider this appeal on the jurisdictional issues itself. And so that hearing is going to be coming up on the 6th, so next Tuesday.

[Brian Reed]

So she won't be coming back to Vermont this week.

[Carol Rose]

That's correct.

[Mike Heastand]

Okay.

[Carol Rose]

That's correct. And so, you know, delay is this tactic that we've seen, you know, the President Trump use in his personal life and his business dealings. And now the Department of Justice is using these same kinds of delay tactics as a way to prevent people from getting justice in this country.

[Brian Reed]

When was the first time you or someone on the legal team spoke to Ramesa after she was apprehended?

[Carol Rose]

The first time was in the right after she was picked up when we first found out she was in Louisiana. So that's when her immigration attorney was able to talk to her on the phone.

[Brian Reed]

And what did she learn? What was her demeanor? What was she saying?

[Carol Rose]

Well, I mean, she's scared. And she's put this into a declaration that we filed with the court. She's incredibly scared, as you can imagine. She would be. And the conditions of confinement are really scary, too. She's in a very crowded space with a lot of other women. It's very cold. They took away her hijab, her head covering. She says there are mice there. And really scary is she has asthma. And they took away her medication, her asthma medicine. And so she's had more asthma attacks in the time that she's been down there than in the rest of her life combined. So conditions of confinement are not good. That's why the report was called the black hole. Right. But anytime your liberty is taken away, anytime you're put into a cage, that is when the power of the government is at its greatest. And that's why we have this constitutional protection of the writ of habeas corpus. Because taking away your actual liberty and putting you in a cage is just such a fundamental and clear denial of rights. And let's be clear. She has not been accused of any crime. None whatsoever. Or any immigration violations. She's only been punished and locked up because she published an op ed with other students in the Tufts daily back in 2024. That is the only reason that she's had her liberty taken away. And that cannot stand in a democracy.

[Moderator or Event Host]

Thank you, Carol. So you just mentioned that the sole evidence you see is her co authoring of this op ed. I want to just hear this clip from Secretary of State Marco Rubio two days after Rumesa was taken.

[Argia Talipragada]

If we could play that.

[Marco Rubio (clip)]

If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student, and you tell us that the reason why you're coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op eds, but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus. We're not going to give you a visa. We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist, that tears up our university campuses.

[Moderator or Event Host]

We want to mention that we invited Secretary Rubio to join us here, but his team said ultimately he was too busy. So, Carol, to clear this up for the record, is there any evidence that this is true, that she has engaged in activities that are destructive?

[Carol Rose]

Absolutely nothing. Nothing has been introduced to the court. And in fact, in another feat of good journalism, the Washington Post came out with a story that basically showed that there are actually memos in the State Department that show that they tried and they couldn't find any. Any evidence that she had said anything or done anything anti Semitic that she'd said or done anything that supports a terrorist organization that she's committed any crime. The government admits that. Okay? The government admits that. And what Secretary of State Rubio is trying to say is that the rights that all people have in this country, whether they're citizens or non citizens, like due process, like writ of habeas corpus, like freedom of speech, that they're saying that they're asserting that they can deny that, that they can lock you up simply because they're taking your visa away. And that is not true. That cannot stand. It is not a true statement of the law. And that's exactly what we're fighting about in the court right now, because the immigration courts and the immigration judges are part of the executive branch of the government, even though they're called immigration judges, they're administrative judges, and they're actually part of the Department of Justice. So they're in the executive branch. They're what are called Article 3 judges setting forth Article 3 of the Constitution, are the judges who uphold our constitutional rights. Those are the judges that are appointed for life. It's really important that we're trying to say the Article 3 judges that defend constitutional rights have the proper jurisdiction. Where the government and Rubio are trying to argue that, no, actually the executive branch can do whatever we want when it comes to visas and when it comes to due process and when it comes to free speech and when it comes to habeas corpus. And that's simply a misstatement of the law. That's what we're taking to the courts right now. And so far, that's what the courts. The courts have cited with the ACLU and all the lawyers who are arguing on behalf of setting these journalists free and making sure that people like Ramesa Ostrich and other people aren't being punished simply for exercising their core protected right to core political speech. That's the most highly protected form of speech under the First Amendment is core protected political speech. And that's all this is. And she's committed no crime, and the government hasn't even asserted that she's committed a crime.

[Brian Reed]

Takes me to my first question for Rob, which is, like, so basic it almost feels dumb. It's just, how can the government do this? Like, don't we have the First Amendment? They can't do this. Right? So why is it happening? Like, what am I missing? What are a lot of us not understanding here?

[Rob Bertschi]

You're not missing a thing. Unfortunately. This country was built on creating a ruckus, and that's what the First Amendment is about your right to create a ruckus. And in fact, that that is the way democracy works, that by creating a ruckus, we have a conversation that helps to improve the democratic process. This is not normal. And the first time I got the call from a student newspaper asking what do we do when students ask to take down the op EDS that they have written?

[Brian Reed]

Oh, you're getting those calls too.

[Rob Bertschi]

Oh, absolutely.

[Brian Reed]

And an uptick recently or when did they start?

[Rob Bertschi]

Steadily. Yeah.

[Brian Reed]

Really? Okay.

[Rob Bertschi]

And the calls from that they are receiving from people who've engaged in protests and are just a subject of a story. Their names are mentioned in the story and they want their name out of that story. Now, we used to say that creates a hole in history. We don't want to take out names from stories for any reason other than that they were false and we made a mistake. But those rules don't apply anymore. You know, Mike Easton said in the clip we heard that it used to be under the first Amendment that we didn't allow this sort of thing. I don't know what the rules are now. I know what I want the rules to be. But when a person comes to my office and says to me, should I write this op ed? Should I put myself out there? I'm an international student, what should I do? As their lawyer, I can't encourage them to write that op ed that goes against every fiber in my being. But to protect themselves under this administration, I can't encourage them to do that.

[Brian Reed]

Discouraging them from voicing their opinion is what that goes against every five years.

[Rob Bertschi]

Absolutely.

[Marty Baron]

Yeah.

[Brian Reed]

So this is a new, basically position of legal advice that you're giving to people, Is that right?

[Rob Bertschi]

Well, absolutely. I mean, you know, in 1964, the US Supreme Court decided a case called New York Times against Sullivan, one of the most important first amendment cases of our time.

[Brian Reed]

We just did a two part series on it last week. Go check it out. It's in your feed right now. It's in your feed the last two episodes.

[Rob Bertschi]

But one of the concerns in that case that the Supreme Court had was the concern that we needed to allow space around free speech. We needed to allow innocent error to be tolerated in our society. Because otherwise you would create a chilling effect. You would chill people from going anywhere near the borderline between truth and falsity. And that would discourage civic discourse. We're beyond chilling now. We're frozen. We're absolutely frozen. And the other parallel, I'll say, Brian, to the New York Times against Sullivan case is that the worry there was that the decisions were all going to be made in the courts of Alabama at a time of great segregation.

[Brian Reed]

Right. It was initially a civil rights case. It was about a civil rights ad that was being done in the New York Times.

[Rob Bertschi]

It was a civil rights case, as this is a civil rights case as well. And the worry was that the courts of Alabama were going to decide this case. And when the courts of Alabama decided the case, they decided against the New York Times. And it was only when it came to the Supreme Court that that was overturned. We have the same issue here. Carol's fighting so hard to get this decided in Vermont instead of Louisiana, at least in part. Tell me if I'm wrong, because we know how the Louisiana court is likely to judge, and we have a sense of how the Vermont federal district court is likely to decide.

[Moderator or Event Host]

There's something I'd like to clear up that I think has been a source of confusion for a lot of people. And it's the question of, are non citizens protected under the First Amendment, and to what degree, and if not, what? Okay, there's your answer. Are they being targeted by the government because of their vulnerability of their immigration status?

[Rob Bertschi]

I think that's very clear, and I think that's purposeful. And I think Secretary Rubio's comments confirm

[Brian Reed]

that legally, constitutionally, noncitizens are equally as protected or supposed to be under the First Amendment. But I'm just trying to kind of process this or regurgitate it back. But the government does have this extra lever they can pull with a visa.

[Carol Rose]

That's right.

[Brian Reed]

Basically to try and leverage against somebody whose speech they don't like, technically.

[Carol Rose]

Right. So as a constitutional matter, free speech and due process, those are constitutional protections for every person in the United States, regardless of your immigration status.

[Brian Reed]

And that's been found by the Supreme Court in the past. Yes.

[Carol Rose]

So what the government is trying to do here is to say that a different statute, a law called the Immigration and Nationalization act, somehow trumps the Constitution. So it's a whole different body of law where there's a lot of deference given to the executive branch to sort of say, who do I want to give a visa to? Who do I not want to give a visa to? And what the government is arguing is that that power should trump our constitutional rights, which makes no sense. I mean, that's just not simply not true. So they're trying to change the law by saying that the constitutional protections that extend to all people by virt of being in this country somehow get Trump when they decide to take away people's visas and take away their rights as an immigration matter. And we're arguing that's not the way the law should be read, and that's not what the law has been historically. So we'll see what happens in the courts, but that's exactly where the issues are being joined.

[Brian Reed]

Are there past examples or cases that you've looked at or that we can look to, like red scare McCarthyism times like, you know, I've read a bit about cases where the government during that time tried to deport someone for being a member of the Communist Party, for instance. Like, are there things you are looking at and that the government's relying on to say, we can do this? Actually, Sure.

[Carol Rose]

I mean, both sides are bringing out all the cases and saying it's analogous or it's similar or things like that. But the reality of it is, is they don't really have a very strong case here because these fundamental constitutional rights like habeas corpus, free speech, due process, historically, those have always extended to all people who are in this country. So they're making these arguments. I don't think they're going to win. And so far in the district courts and the federal courts, but the court in Vermont where the federal court ruled, no, bring her back. We're going to have the hearing here in Vermont. But similarly, just a few minutes ago, there was a ruling from the district court in New Jersey in the Maupin Khalil case saying similarly, no, she should come back in front of an Article 3, a constitutional judge. He should come back and be heard in this court. He's a legal permanent resident. So it's even more sort of interesting that they're trying to argue that he could be. He could have his legal permanent status taken away. And so we're seeing these different arguments being played out. But the situation with Ramesa is particularly alarming because, you know, whereas, you know, some of the other people who are being detained actually engaged in student activism, legal student activism. She literally has done nothing but sign an op ed. And the Tufts president, Sunil Kumar and others have said in court she didn't violate any of the Tufts rules of student conduct. She didn't violate any of the campus policies. She's really involved in child development, childhood development and working with children. And that's really her passion. And so the fact that they decided to pick her out of all the people they could because she co signed an op ed in the, you know, in the student newspaper is particularly alarming because if they are allowed to get away with. With it with her, then they'll probably try it with a lot of other people.

[Brian Reed]

What's going on here? Like, what is it actually about? Do you have insight into that, either of you, from reading about the case, from disclosures in the, in the case? Like, what's the government's motivation here, actually? Is this about free speech? Is this about immigration? Is it about Palestine? What is going on?

[Carol Rose]

I think it's about attacking our democracy. I think it's about literally dismantling our universities. They've said they want to dismantle the universities. I think it's about dismantling the rule of law and going after law firms. I think it's about dismantling the right to vote. I think it's about dismantling science. This is all about a power grab. This is. This isn't a dress rehearsal. This is really about the rise of authoritarianism and fascism in our country. And it's incumbent upon all of us, and particularly those of us who have a little bit more, maybe a lot more legal protection because we're citizens, that we need to raise our voices where others are unable to do so.

[Rob Bertschi]

And I'd add that it's about administrative power. That chilling effect is happening in all areas, as Carol notes. Education, journalism, you name it. Immigration, obviously here. And the challenge from the public's point of view is the courts are slow and the administration is working awfully fast. Think what has happened in the last 100 days and the courts are still talking about jurisdiction in these cases. And that for me, is awfully frustrating because Rumesa is not getting asthma medication while the lawyers are arguing about the fine points of jurisdiction, which seem very important when you're in law school, but seem marginal when you're talking about somebody's life.

[Moderator or Event Host]

How does that change legal strategies when everything is being rewritten?

[Carol Rose]

Well, you know, I think part of it is, you know, I always say democracy is like a muscle, and the more we lean into it, the more we flex it, the stronger it gets. And so I think actually invoking the power of the courts, invoking the power of journalism, invoking the power of our universities, these are really important people marching and protesting. It really matters. And the law is, as Ram says, incredibly slow. But you know what? Those are speed bumps, too. And a lot of those speed bumps are going to become traffic ballers. They're going to stop them. Okay? So I do think the courts and the law has an incredibly important role to play. And, you know, everybody says, well, they had all this time to get ready. Well, you know what? So did we, and we are ready. And we've been meeting them. The ACLU has now filed 100 legal actions in the first hundred days. So we are. We're in all 50 states and across the country. And, you know, we are fighting them at every step of the way, and we will continue to do so. But we also need the people who take to the streets and who write op eds and who continue to do the stories and who continue to do the podcasts and continue to listen to the podcasts. Everything that we can do, whatever you can do within your power, within your sphere of influence, now's the time to do it. It's an all hands on deck moment, and we can't afford to say, well, we're going to leave it to the courts or leave it to the journalists or leave it to the protesters. Every one of us has to be in this fight right now. And I think that if we all come together and we're able to do this, we will, in fact, hold them off and turn the tide.

[Rob Bertschi]

And we can't leave it to the international students either, because they're the ones who are most in peril about speaking out. So the rest of us have an obligation to be doing that.

[Brian Reed]

I appreciate that. Spirit, not to be a Debbie Downer here, but I heard you say earlier, Carol, that, like, you're pretty confident you're going to eventually win with Rameza's case. You're going to appeal and say this was protected speech, she's been retaliated against, that's unconstitutional. But have they already won? I mean, we're hearing, like, as I played in the beginning, you know, that people are not publishing things they want to publish. They're not speaking their mind. You know, Rob, I'm curious if you even have an anecdote of a conversation you had in the last few weeks. If you say that you're having these conversations and advising people not to speak, like, has the damage been done? And how do you roll that chilling effect back? Can you?

[Rob Bertschi]

Unfortunately, I think you're absolutely right. And we have crossed a Rubicon that I don't think we can go back upon. We are not going to have international students come to the United States in nearly the same numbers anymore, because sensibly, they say the United States is too dangerous a place for us to send our sons and daughters to.

[Brian Reed]

How about the effect on speech of people who are here, too?

[Rob Bertschi]

Same thing. Same thing. You are taking that much of a risk if you speak out, nobody wants to have to go through what Mesa Ozturk is going through. Even if you win in the end, you don't want to be subjected to that.

[Brian Reed]

You said you've had to have some conversations that go against the fiber of your being recently. Can you share one that you're able to talk about in some way?

[Rob Bertschi]

I have found myself in an upside down world because I'm asked, well, should we take this down from our newspaper? Can I publish this dissenting voice? And last year I'd have said, hell yeah, absolutely. That's what it's all about. That's what journalism is all about. I can't say that anymore with a straight face and protecting my client. I can say it in the abstract, but I can't say it if I'm really protecting my client. They have to make a decision for themselves. And what I thought the First Amendment said, well, maybe it says it in the law books, maybe it says it in the case law, but right now, in the courts, in the way that the administration is proceeding, the first amendment is cracked.

[Brian Reed]

Is this the best we can do right now? Is there anything we can do to repair that crack so that you can feel more comfortable saying, you know what? I think you actually can't publish it. I think it'll be okay. Like brass tacks. What can we be doing legally, journalistically, civically?

[Rob Bertschi]

We have to. Those of us who can have to resist in every single way we can, both through protests, through courts, through op eds, through, you know, I don't know, a better way.

[Brian Reed]

How does that work exactly? How does that stop it? Take me through the, like, the dream version.

[Rob Bertschi]

At some point, the public indignation, I believe I'm built on the optimism that that can have an effect.

[Carol Rose]

And I would just add, hope is a political act and courage is contagious. And so we saw initially, for example, with the law firms that some of them backed down. And then others came forward, like Wilmer Hale and Perkins Coie, and said, no, we're going to fight back. And when they did, it became okay. And then 700 law firms signed on. We saw the same thing with the universities. When Columbia initially backed down, and then it looked like that was just the beginning of the negotiation. And then we've seen Tufts and Harvard and Williams and other colleges come forward and be courageous and give permission to other people to be courageous. And when people come out on the streets, it really makes a big difference. When people came out for the hands off event, it was incredible. And right after that, we had members of Congress take A delegation go down to Louisiana and to visit Mesa Osturk in that black hole where she's being held. And to shine a light on that. We saw members of Congress going down to El Salvador and looking at the people in prison there. I think it's incredibly important that we take every action, because when we do, we don't give in to despair, because authoritarians want us to give in to despair. They want us to give in to fear. And they're the playground bullies. The playground bully always goes back to the person who they can punch and take their lunch money. But the person who punches back, they don't go to them again. They go back to the person who backs down. So it's incredibly important that all of us in whatever positions that we have, and particularly those of us in positions of privilege, for example, US Citizens, that we raise our voices, that we speak out. There is safety in numbers, and we just simply cannot afford despair. We have to go forward. We have to overcome our fear. This is our generation's moment to speak out, to stand up, to march, to fight, to do whatever you can to fight back so that the people who don't have as much privilege and power as we do are able to also live in peace and have their rights protected. So, you know, I don't have hope because I think we're necessarily going to overcome it. I have hope because I know that through action, hope is generated and hope is contagious. Encourage is contagious. And it's time for all of us to do our bit to make sure we defend the democracy that 250 years ago, our ancestors defended. Now it's our turn, and I'm damn sure that I'm going to spend my life doing that.

[Brian Reed]

Thank you, Carol Rose of the ACLU and First Amendment attorney Rob Bertschi. Coming up, what advice do professional journalists have for student journalists like those here at the Tufts Daily? A student editor in chief gets to ask for advice from one of the most legendary pro editors out there. That's after a quick break. Artificial intelligence is moving very, very fast, and it's raising new questions just about every day about what it is, what it isn't. When all is said and done, what is the end game? I'm Chris Hayes, and as part of

[Marco Rubio (clip)]

my podcast, why Is this Happening?

[Brian Reed]

I'm speaking with leading experts each week to help the ground that conversation.

[Argia Talipragada]

We're right now in a situation where

[Carol Rose]

it's very difficult to understand what is

[Akela Lacy]

real and what's not real.

[Brian Reed]

Why is this happening? The AI Endgame a special miniseries from Ms. Now. Start listening today, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Question Everything. We're live here at Tufts University. I'm here with the editor in chief of the Tufts Daily, Argia Talipragata. Argia, you're a junior from Lynchburg, Virginia, Right. And you're studying engineering and philosophy.

[Argia Talipragada]

Yes.

[Mike Heastand]

Yeah.

[Brian Reed]

I think it's remarkable that you're at this moment kind of having to shepherd the Tufts Daily through this very intense time where a Tufts student has been detained and threatened with deportation for an op ed that they co authored in your publication. And so this is kind of, I think, an opportunity for you, I hope, to ask some pros about what they would do if they were in your position. And so to do that, we have Akayla Lacy from the Intercept. Akayla, you out here? Akela is a senior politics reporter at the Intercept. And in this second Trump administration, she's been covering protests, turmoil, speech, and the government's influence on college campuses across the country. And we're also joined remotely here by Marty Baron. Marty?

[Marty Baron]

Hi, Marty.

[Brian Reed]

Hope you can see us. Marty was executive editor of the Washington Post for eight years, I believe, including during the first Trump term. And before that he was editor of the hometown paper here, the Boston Globe, and oversaw, among many other things, the investigation into sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. I think. Take it away. Like, what questions you got for these guys?

[Argia Talipragada]

Thank you, Brian. So my first question is for you, Akela. So you're reporting on college campuses all across the country. I want to know about the impact of Rumesa's case. So are you hearing about columns being canceled or pieces being scrubbed, student writers making tough decisions on what to say or publish? Essentially what we want to know is, is this having a chilling effect?

[Akela Lacy]

Yeah. So Rumesa's case was obviously one of the biggest escalations that we've seen on the crackdown on college campuses that started last year. Prior to this administration, I've heard from students at other schools who have been disciplined by their schools for writing op eds, no one who has been abducted or detained by ice. But this is, I think, as you heard on the previous segment, this is causing a lot of people to question student journalists. Do I want to try to pursue a career in this field? Is it possible for me to pursue a career in this field and to continue reporting and writing about the things that I believe in? We also see students trying to figure out how to take things into their own hands when they see their administrators or the leaders of their schools backing down in the face of these incredible attacks against them and not, you know, sticking to the principles of academic freedom, you know, public discourse and the exchange of ideas, these, these things that our universities are supposedly built on, students are saying, okay, well, you're saying that, and then you're letting. Calling the cops in to arrest my friends. You're, you're telling me that I'm getting a disciplinary charge for an op ed that I wrote two years ago because Congress is threatening to withhold money from our school now. And so I am trying to encourage students to keep their heads up, as difficult as that can be. But the chilling effect is terrifying. And I don't think that we've really, despite the intense escalation that we've seen over the last four or five months, I don't think that we have the capacity to understand the ramifications of this for the future.

[Brian Reed]

Kayla, is there a moment or interaction you've had with a student in your reporting where it hit you, what's happening? Is there one that you can share with us?

[Akela Lacy]

Yeah. So talking to student protesters, you know, I've had iterations of this conversation multiple times, but we were covering sort of protests at Rust Belt colleges throughout the country where there had been a lot of attention on, you know, the Northeast and Ivy League universities. And we wanted to show what working class students were going through and putting themselves on the line during, during this time. And one student at the end of our conversation said, no matter what they do, it's only making us stronger. What schools are doing is actually having the opposite effect, a backfiring effect in strengthening the resolve that students have, whether they're protesting or organizing on their campuses, that no matter what happens and what they throw at them, there's no way that this is going to go away. I've heard iterations of that over and over again, but that is what has stuck with me and what I don't quite think my generation or older generations can necessarily grasp all the time when we're talking about this, that while people are afraid, it's actually making it harder for the administration to keep this up going forward, because there's going to be. They're only strengthening the backlash from people who no longer have faith in the government and no longer have faith in the university system.

[Argia Talipragada]

You published something recently, four days ago, I think, about the Barnard administration called a bomb threat, targeted student protesters. So why did they get blamed for it? This jumped out at me as a student because the administration is supposed to be something that the students can trust in these Times. I just want to know, can you talk us through what happened there?

[Akela Lacy]

Thank you for mentioning that story. A source reached out to me a few weeks ago about this incident that took place place on Barnard's campus in New York last month, where student protesters held a sit in protesting Israel's war on Gaza at a building on campus where the library was housed. And that day, the school also received a bomb threat by email. And basically police were called to campus. Nine students were arrested for refusing evacuation orders. And the story that came out from the school and the next day in media coverage was that nine students had been arrested at this protest after there was a bomb threat. The takeaway, if you're not paying attention, is an assumption that the students were responsible for the threat. The school president, Laura Ann Rosenberry, also later blamed the student protesters for putting the entire community at risk for not evacuating the campus because of the threat. What we found out was that the threat specifically targeted pro Palestine protesters. The language, I won't repeat it because it's derogatory and inappropriate, but it was very clear who they were targeting. And the school never told the. To my knowledge, the school has still not told the students that they were the target of this bomb threat. It was leaked, basically, to a couple of faculty members who discussed it a few days later. And in conversations with attorneys who have been working with these students and faculty who have been supporting them, they thought it was outrageous that over a month later, there was still no indication from the school that its student body had been specifically targeted in what it said was a credible bomb threat that required them to call the NYPD to campus. Some other questions that were raised in the course of reporting this story was when and why the school actually called police to campus. There were competing reports where at first the NYPD told another group of intrepid student journalists at the Columbia Spectator that they came to the school because of a, quote, unscheduled demonstration and had no knowledge of a bomb threat. A couple days later, they changed their statement and said that they were called because of the bomb threat. The school maintained the whole time that they called the police because of the bomb threat. But we have multiple sources who said they saw the police, the srg, the Strategic Response Group, which is responsible for policing protests, not the bomb squad outside of this college campus building 30 minutes before the bomb threat came in. So our story was about the two tendrils of this, which are Barnard again, calling police to arrest its own students and hiding for over a month that its students were a specific target of a bomb threat on campus. This is also all happening while Barnard is being pressured to turn over information about its students to Congress, which says that it's conducting an investigation into anti Semitism on campus. And where Republicans have repeatedly painted student protesters as terrorists. And faculty and students at Barnard are now concerned that their students are now being interrogated about this bomb threat in meetings that could eventually be turned over to Congress and result in either immigration or criminal charges against these students.

[Argia Talipragada]

Switching gears to Marty, I wanted to ask what happened to Roomsa really hit us at the Daily pretty hard. But admittedly as college students, we haven't had, we haven't spent that much time in journalism. But you, on the other hand, have run two major newsrooms, been a professional journalist for decades. I want to know, did this jump out as something that's new to you in your career? Can you think of a time where anything happened that was like this?

[Marty Baron]

Well, I haven't seen this on college campuses before, but I've certainly had something similar and I would say worse in our, in my experience as an editor at the Washington Post. So In July of 2014, our correspondent in Iran, Jason Rezaian, was arrested along with his wife. She was held for 72 days. He was held for 544 days in prison, much of that time in solitary and in the worst prison in Iran, which is pretty bad. It's interesting because in this particular case of Rumesa, the State Department is making all these allegations. Marco Rubio claiming that her activities could have potentially serious consequences for American foreign policy. All of that, a lot of exaggerated language and exaggerated conclusions about a simple op ed that she co authored. And in the case of Jason, an Iranian interrogator asked him after he had been arrested, do you know why you're here? And he said no, he had no idea why he was there. And he said, you are the head of the CIA station in Tehran, of course, which was complete nonsense. And he was tried on that basis and tried for espionage, which he of course did not commit. He was convicted and in a sham trial at kangaroo court. And we were very concerned about what might happen to him and how long he would be in prison there. Thankfully, he was ultimately released as part of a big deal. But you know, those are the kinds of preposterous allegations that are made in a place like Iran. And then you hear these preposterous allegations made by the Secretary of State here in the United States. The second case that I would mention was the assassination in 2018 of Jamal Khashoggi who was an opinion writer, a guest opinion writer for the Washington Post. He's a Saudi national, but he had permanent residency here in the United States. He was living in Turkey at the time. He went into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain some papers so that he could get married, and he never came out. The Saudis claimed that he had left, but the Turkish government said that he had not left. And it turned out that, of course he had not left. He was assassinated there in the consulate. He was completely dismembered. We don't know where his body was ultimately disposed of or what exactly happened to him. He had simply written a number of columns critical of the Saudi government, one of the most recent ones being criticism of the Saudi war in Yemen, which at the time was called by the UN the greatest humanitarian disaster in the world. World. And of course, in that instance, Trump did absolutely nothing on his behalf. At various times, he expressed concern, but at other times, he expressed total credibility in what the Saudi crown prince was saying. The Saudi crown prince was later found by the CIA with great confidence, was found to have actually ordered an assassination squad to go to Turkey in order to either kidnap or murder our columnist. And Trump did nothing because he felt that there were more important matters than a journalist for the Washington Post. The more important matters being weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and various administration initiatives in the Middle East. And then subsequent to that, as it turns out, his son in law, Jared Kushner. After Trump left office, Jared Kushner was put in charge of managing $2 billion worth of Saudi assets, and he gets a fee right off the top. So those are the circumstances that I confronted when I was the editor of the Washington Post.

[Brian Reed]

What parallels do you see to this situation? Or don't you see, Marty?

[Marty Baron]

Well, preposterous allegations being made by a government. You would hope that our government would be better than that, not make baseless allegations like it is in this instance, in the same way that the Iranian government makes baseless allegations. So that's the parallel with regard to Jason Rezaian. I would say the parallel with regard to Jamal Khashoggi is that you have a Trump administration who frankly doesn't give a damn about journalists or even someone who's not a journalist, but someone who just co authored an opinion column for a newspaper on a college campus. He simply doesn't care about free expression. And in this instance, they make accusations of support for terrorism and all that sort of stuff, even though there's absolutely no evidence of any support for terrorism or a terrorist group or anything. Like that. And the real terror here is emanating from the administration itself. They're seeking to terrorize immigrants. They're seeking to terrorize international students on college campuses. They're seeking to terrorize journalists, and then ultimately to terrorize even American citizens.

[Argia Talipragada]

So after the murder of Khashoggi, did you perceive a chilling effect within the opinion section? And if you did, how did you navigate that? Because that's something that we're, you know, facing right now.

[Marty Baron]

We didn't. I mean, there were various threats made by Saudi nationals against individuals, including our owner, Jeff Bezos. He actually had plans. His company, Amazon, had plans to invest a billion dollars in Saudi Arabia. And that all came to a halt. He himself was threatened in various ways. And then there were people on the staff who received threats as well. But it did not have a chilling effect. We did our job in the news department. We covered the story independently, professionally. And in the opinion section, they waged a campaign on the opinion section, which I was not responsible for, but because there's a wall between opinion and the news department at a place like the Washington Post. But they waged a campaign to first to find what happened to Jamal Khashoggi because we didn't know where he was. And then when we learned that he had been, in fact, assassinated, he had been murdered, to find out who was responsible for that and to bring about justice. And then there was a campaign on the part of the newspaper itself, our publisher, to try to pressure the administration to do something to penalize the Saudis, the crown prince, and the entire Saudi government for having murdered a journalist merely for publishing opinions that the Saudi government didn't like. And so that campaign lasted a long time. Ultimately, there really was no justice because the Trump administration didn't care. So there was no chilling effect within our newsroom or within the opinion department or within the paper overall.

[Brian Reed]

Marty, with the Jason Rezaian case, I see some kind of parallel between you having to lead the news organization in covering what was happening to one of your journalists while one of your journalists was in this very vulnerable position. What Argie is going through, where someone who's written for their pages is in a vulnerable position being held, and they're having to cover this story as well. And I'm curious, just if you could take us inside that experience as a leader of the paper at that time, did you face pressure internally from Jason's family, from the administration, to alter your coverage in any way to not piss off the Iranians, for instance, and possibly put him in danger or further Danger?

[Marty Baron]

Well, you know, we just tried to cover it in many ways. Pretty much the way we would cover any other story is try to find out what happened, trying to describe what was in fact occurring, what his case was supposedly all about, which of course, the Iranians wouldn't explain, and to see what the administration was trying to do in order to obtain his release. And so that's what we did. It's obviously very emotional for anybody who's having to cover this, but as a news department, you know, you have to maintain some level of, I don't know, just being distancing yourself a little bit from it in order to cover it. And in the same way that, you know, if you're the police department, if you have to investigate a murder, you can't become emotional about it. And so, you know, you have to ultimately control your emotions and cover the story and in a thorough way. And that's what we did. We never got pressure at all from the family. We worked with the family. We had constant contact. Our foreign editor was in constant contact with Jason's brother and with his mother. And so they were not opposed in any way to our coverage. And the feeling was the more attention we brought to his case, the more likely he was to be released.

[Argia Talipragada]

So we at the Daily are getting a ton of takedown requests for articles. So I'm wondering, do you have any advice for newsrooms like ours and newsrooms across the country who are receiving these requests and now have to figure out what to do when writers are afraid to have their work published or want

[Brian Reed]

to have it taken down after it is published?

[Marty Baron]

Yeah, well, look, I mean, it's a very difficult decision. It's hard to give advice in these circumstances. Obviously, there's a lot at stake for the people who make these takedown requests. The only point that I would make is that probably all of this is still available in the Internet Archive. It's probably already been archived by the administration and by outfits like Canary Mission, which have been identifying people they feel should be targeted for removal from the country for purported anti Semitic behavior or anti Israel behavior or whatever it might be. So taking it down is probably not going to mean that it's been removed from detection. So I think that's something to consider, but it's very personal, and I don't really have individual advice. It would be worth listening to each individual person about what the circumstances were. I do feel that that is a bit of giving the administration what it wants. It says, we don't want these things published. And then the people who publish them, the people who wrote them, in fact, they don't publish anymore and they take down what they've already published. And in a way, that's a victory for the administration. And I do think that all of us who value Free Express need to stand up against that. That said, as I, as I indicated this very personal matter, and I'm not sure I have. Fantastic.

[Brian Reed]

I was surprised to learn in talking to the attorney, Mike, he stand from the Student Press Legal center, that they actually have revised their kind of like Rob was talking about their standard advice, whereas before they would be like, hell no, it stays up. We don't revise history in this way. They're not saying take it down, but when they issued actually kind of a preemptive statement after getting so many calls to say it makes sense for student newsrooms to revisit these policies and have a bit more of an open mind than we've had in the past, which I found surprising. But I'm curious, Kayla, what you're hearing in your reporting. What are the different types of approaches you've heard of and which ones strike you as maybe, yeah, the most compelling or just something we could think about right now?

[Akela Lacy]

So I can share without giving identifying information. But we have been going through this to some extent at the Intercept. We work with journalists in Palestine and of Palestinian descent. And there was one case where a contributing writer who we work with had gotten this Palestinian writer to write a piece, I think, several years ago. But around post October 7th attacks on and the war on Gaza. And they reached out in the early months, I think it was sometime around the election actually, before all of this stuff had started happening, asking because their family was in proceedings to get a green card, something related to that. And they were concerned about having their byline up on our website. And there was this big back and forth. I'm not an editor, so I luckily don't have this decision on my shoulders. But the editors originally were very adamant that they didn't want to take this down because of your point that we don't rewrite history, we don't erase stuff when it gets inconvenient. But the reporter who had connected this freelancer with us was distraught because it was the first time that this question had really been raised. Do we put our journalistic principles ahead of someone's immediate safety when they're telling us, I'm going to be persecuted by the government if you don't do that?

[Brian Reed]

It is also a journalistic principle to minimize harm.

[Akela Lacy]

Exactly.

[Brian Reed]

Journalistic principles among Many others.

[Akela Lacy]

Thank you. Yes. And so in that case, I think. And so, I mean, I'm not actually sure what ended up happening with that case, but this is coming up again and again. I mean, I think to Marty's point, it really is an individual, like a case by case situation, which is not a helpful answer for somebody who's dealing with this every day. But I think you have to weigh the risks and the benefits to your paper of, I think, you know, the point that this stuff is already out there. Like, the op ed is not going to be, you know, in Ramesa's case, it was the reason, you know, the ostensible reason that they detained her. But if they're coming after you, they're going to find something to take you for. Like, it's not. If you take down the op ed, you might feel like you're protecting yourself more. And I don't want to sound so cynical and depressing, but that is the reality of where we are right now. So, you know, it might feel like you're exerting some form of control.

[Carol Rose]

Control.

[Akela Lacy]

But at the end of the day, we have no control, which is terrifying.

[Brian Reed]

Okay, can I ask you a question? Something I've noticed, just like talking to you and your fellow colleagues on the paper, like, when I've asked about, so what are you doing? What is your policy? And now that you're being faced with these takedown requests, you guys have been a little reluctant to talk about what it is, is been my sense. And when I talk to the exiting opinions editor at the Yale Daily News, the audio I played at the beginning, he told this whole story, as you heard, about how he's gotten four or five requests to take down previously published pieces. And when I said, okay, so what's the end of the story? Did you take them down? He said he didn't want to comment on it and he wouldn't comment on the Yale Daily News retraction policies. I'm not asking you to comment on Tufts, but that was interesting to me. Like, my impulse, just from where I sit is if you're going to be taking stuff down and erasing history, at least be transparent about the policy in some way. That's kind of like my gut reaction. But how are you guys thinking about it? There must be considerations that I'm not appreciating that make you guys want to not be transparent about your thinking.

[Argia Talipragada]

Sure. Well, yeah, I mean, we've, we get a lot of advice and I think conversations like this really do help. But we are trying to we follow policy and, but also we take things on a case by case basis and our policies are up on our website. But we're looking to minimize real financial, emotional or physical harm. And something that we talked about was the idea that physical harm can be actual physical harm or political harm, someone getting detained or deported. So in each of these takedown requests, we're looking at these details.

[Brian Reed]

Can you give a sense of how many takedown requests you've gotten?

[Argia Talipragada]

Maybe less than 10.

[Brian Reed]

Okay, yeah. But in the last month, I mean,

[Argia Talipragada]

it's been a huge increase since this happened. So this is, this is certainly due to the detainment of Rumesa.

[Brian Reed]

And do you have a special, have you formed like a special committee or something to deal with these? Do you have a process that you've come up with internally? Is there an editor who's in charge of assessing them?

[Argia Talipragada]

We at the Tufts Daily leadership, we look at, we look at these cases and we also get advice from others.

[Brian Reed]

Do you feel like you have it figured out? Like, do you feel good about the process or you're like, I don't know, like this feels like just grasping in the dark?

[Argia Talipragada]

I mean, I think the situation just is changing with every day. So I would say that we are, we're slowly figuring it out. It's definitely a process that we're still working on, but we feel good about the policies that we've created.

[Brian Reed]

Yeah. All right, I'll let you ask. I'll leave you alone now, let you ask your questions of these guys. But I've just, it's just been. Yeah, I've been curious about the kind of hush hushness about these policies on campuses, Student newspapers, definitely.

[Argia Talipragada]

I guess one thing that I wanted to ask for both of you, this audience is full of tough students. What advice do you have for someone here, like a writer here, who has something to say but is now afraid to say it?

[Marty Baron]

Well, if you don't say it, you're giving in to the pressure from this administration. The right to free expression means absolutely nothing if it's not exercised. And so merely to hold back because you're, you're scared. I understand the pressures, but that's something that people should think about, is that if you don't exercise your right to free expression out of fear, then in practical terms, you have no right to free expression. You have censored yourself. And that's exactly what this administration wants to have happen. So I'm very reluctant to give them the kind of victories that they hope to have that suggest that we are not entitled to the rights that are written into the Constitution of the United States. And I am concerned when law firms yield to pressure from Donald Trump. I'm concerned when universities yield to pressure from Donald Trump. I've been concerned when some media organizations have yielded to pressure from Donald Trump because that merely is an invitation to apply more pressure because they know that pressure will work. And the greater the pressure, the greater the fear, the more likely that people will simply not express themselves or will not engage in political activity generally that they feel will make themselves a target of this administration. That's a victory for the Trump administration. And I am reluctant, to say the least to give the administration the kind of victories that it's looking for on this front.

[Brian Reed]

I'm curious, just as a follow up, Marty, and this is for you too, Akela, and I'm thinking of it myself. Like, have either of you ever felt kind of the personal danger that could be tied to publishing something that certain international students might be feeling right now? The personal jeopardy?

[Argia Talipragada]

Yeah.

[Akela Lacy]

I mean, I'm a US Citizen, but I'm also a black woman. And I cover police. I cover police brutality. I cover the pro Israel lobby in Congress. I've had plenty of stuff thrown at me. I'm not concerned about being deported, obviously, because I'm a US Citizen, but I am concerned about traveling. I'm concerned about, you know, my mom is like, today, she was like, be safe. I'm like, I'm in Boston. But there's concerns, and particularly because the intersection of the things that I cover have been sort of the flashpoints of the biggest social movements that we've seen over the last five years in this country. I certainly am concerned about it, but I also am really grateful that I work at a place like the Intercept, where our tagline is fearless adversarial journalism. But what's really behind that is knowing that I have support from every person on my editorial team to approach my reporting from the position that everyone deserves human rights and human dignity and that there are political forces in this world that are diametrically opposed to that. And so covering those forces as if they operate in a vacuum or are neutral is not objectivity. And so I come to every story with that approach. Approach, and I take pride in that. So I want to tell you, just do the right thing and you'll be fine. But we are all coming to this from different positionalities and with different levels of support. And so I think it really does. To your initial question, like, what's your advice for journalists or students who want to be writing about this stuff. I agree with Marty. I think do it because doing the opposite is caving in. But you also do need to be smart. And if you know that you are more vulnerable than your friend who might be a U.S. citizen who, who is encouraging you to write about this, like, reach out to the resources that you have on campus, to the Student Press Law center or to the aclu, or make sure that you have.

[Brian Reed]

I know, but that's what I'm thinking about. I'm like, I'm an international student. I reach out to Rob to get some advice and he says, don't write your op ed as your lawyer. Can't in good faith say that this is the greatest idea. And I'm just trying to put myself in that position as someone. I'm not an international student.

[Akela Lacy]

I think the depressing part of that point is that there are going to, like, sometimes the answer will be don't, don't do the right thing. And like, maybe there's another way for you to, to, you know, do your activism or do your speaking out about this, but you have to, you have to be realistic about, about the, the country that we're living in right now. And I don't think that we as journalists or as lawyers can, can be going around and pretending like everything's fine and that democracy will prevail because it's not.

[Brian Reed]

Yeah. Marty, how do you think about that? The kind of balancing the high minded or like the principled approach with the potential personal peril, I guess, that people might be weighing?

[Marty Baron]

I think anybody who's in journalism is going to face threats if they deal with sensitive subjects. I certainly have, particularly after the election of 2020. Many of the Trump supporters threatened me, threatened my colleagues. They received even worse than I did. Our security team regularly checked out those threats, whether they came by phone or whether they came via social media or emails or whatever it might be. Some threats were delivered to people's individual doors at their homes. And some of those people who issue those threats had criminal backgrounds, by the way, for violent crimes. So that was deeply concerning. And then after January 6th of 2021, some of the people who participated in that or organized that disseminated advice that said that we don't have to act as a group, we can act autonomously, we know where people live. Take action on your own. So that was a concerning thing as well. And I received a lot of threats at that point as well. Look, I had to keep doing my job. I can't say, well, I'm Going to stop doing my job because these threats are being issued. On the other hand, you watch who's around you, what the movements are. You monitor things, you alert your security team to potential threats. But I can't say I'm going to. I think I'll just check out of journalism while this passes. That's not. That's not possible because we had a job to do and a very important job to do. And I think what everybody's learning at Tufts, I hope, is just how important journalism is. It's important that. And great that Tufts Daily is covering this story so energetically and so professionally. We need that. We need the facts. And I think it's a reminder, by the way, that the attacks on journalists is just a precursor to attacks on free expression by everybody. We are the first target because we have institutions, we have some sort of organization. And so if an administration can crush us first, then they can go after every individual out there. And that is the path that has been followed by dictators throughout the world and over the course of history. First they go after the press, then they proceed to try to extinguish the rights of all citizens, particularly the free expression rights of all citizens. And we can't allow that. We can't allow that to happen. So, yes, it is a matter of principle, but people do need to be careful, and every person should come to his or her own individual decision about that. I think when you are writing a piece, for example, let's say if you're writing an opinion piece like Ramesa wrote, look, I mean, one of the things that works in her favor is that she did not advocate violence against other people. She did not support a terrorist group. So those are the kinds of things that her lawyers can now point out in court that says that merely she was just arguing for a policy on the part of Tufts, the University, on the part of the U.S. government. And whether you agree or disagree with that policy, she was not actually arguing for violence against other people, and she was not being hateful, she was not being anti Semitic. So I think, you know, those are the kinds of things to be aware of is how do you write it? What do you write? What do you really think, by the way? And so you do need to exercise some care in how you go about your job and how you go about your work and how you go about expressing your opinions. But that doesn't mean that you should withdraw completely and not express opinions and not weigh in on matters of public concern.

[Brian Reed]

All right, thank you. On that note, we want to draw this to a close just by reading some words from Rumaya Ozturk. These, I believe were dictated from her to one of her attorneys while she has been and is currently still in detention. She said, I believe the world is a more beautiful and peaceful place when we listen to each other and allow different perspectives to be in the room. Writing is one of the most peaceful ways of addressing systemic inequality. Efforts to target me because of my op ed in the Tufts Daily calling for the equal dignity and humanity of all people will not deter me from my commitment to advocate for the rights of youth and children. That's from Rube. So in detention, If everyone can just stick around, I'm going to read the credits really quickly. This event has been a co production of Question Everything and the Tufts Daily. It was produced by our Executive producer Robin Simeon, along with staff from the Tufts Daily including Argya Talapragada, Elora Onion Day, Julia Carpi and Claire Wood. A huge, huge thank you to the Tufts Daily. Thank you everybody for hosting us here today on campus for such an important conversation. Please read their paper for their excellent coverage of what's happening to students at universities and at [e-mail] Additional production for Question Everything by our producers Sophie Casis and Zach St. Louis. Our team also includes Associate producer Emily Meltare and contributing editors Neil Drumming and Jen Kinney. This episode will be fact checked by Annika Robbins and sound design by Brendan Baker. Our music is by Matt McGinley. Audio Engineering of our live event was by the the team at Ecast Productions. Additional event production by Alexis Roney. Mara Davis helped with booking. Our partners at KCRW include Arnie Seiple, Gina Delvak, Tejal Algemera, Natalie Hill and Jennifer Farrow. Thanks for listening. Thanks everybody for being here. More next time.

[Akela Lacy]

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