by Amy Yurkanin

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When Max Rykov started reading a Jan. 24 letter sent to the leaders of the country’s 10 refugee resettlement agencies, he found the wording vague but ominous. The agencies were ordered to “stop all work” funded by the Department of State and “not incur any new costs.”

At first, he wondered if the order from the Trump administration was only targeting refugee work in other countries. Rykov, then the director of development and communications at a refugee resettlement partner in Nashville, began texting colleagues at other agencies. “What does it mean?” he asked.

By Monday, three days after the memo, it became clear. The Nashville International Center for Empowerment, along with similar nonprofits across the country, would not have access to the money the government had promised to refugees for their first three months in the United States. That day, NICE laid off 12 of its 56 resettlement staff members and scrambled to free up funds to pay for the basic needs of nearly 170 people dependent on the frozen grants.

Max Rykov arrived in the U.S. as a child and went on to become the director of development and communications at the Nashville International Center for Empowerment, which helps refugees resettle. (Arielle Weenonia Gray for ProPublica)

Rykov knew exactly what was at stake, and that delivered an additional dose of dread. Born in the former USSR, he and his family arrived in the U.S. as refugees in 1993, fleeing the collapse of the Soviet Union, the economic devastation and discrimination against Soviet Jews. He was 4 years old, and it was bewildering. Though his family was part of one of the largest waves of refugee resettlement in U.S. history, they ended up in a place with few Russian immigrants.

Life in Birmingham, Alabama, a post-industrial city shaped by the Civil Rights movement and white flight, revolved around Saturday college football games and Sunday church. Rykov said his family felt “barren” in the U.S. away from their culture. Birmingham’s Jewish community was small and the Russian population tiny.

But a local Jewish organization sponsored the Rykovs and paired them with a “friendship family.” The group rented them an apartment and furnished it. Then the organization helped Rykov’s parents find work. And Birmingham’s Jewish community banded together to fund scholarships for Rykov and other Soviet refugee children to attend a private Jewish school, where Rykov felt less isolated.

He went on to attend the University of Alabama and overcame his feeling of otherness. After graduation, he found purpose in bringing people together through his work organizing cultural events, including arts festivals and an adult spelling bee, doing social media outreach for the Birmingham mayor and, in 2021, finding a dream job at a Nashville nonprofit devoted to the very efforts that he believes helped define him.

When Rykov heard that President Donald Trump’s second administration had ordered cuts to the refugee program, his thoughts raced to the Venezuelan refugee family his organization was assisting, an older woman in poor health, her daughter who cared for her and the daughter’s two children, one not yet kindergarten age. None of them spoke English, and there was no plan for how they would cover the rent, which was due in four days.

“This is a promise that we made to these people that we have reneged on,” he said. “Is that really what’s happening? Yeah, that’s exactly what’s happening.”

As the realization of what lay ahead set in, Rykov started to cry.

Over the next two months, the Trump administration carried out and defended its destabilizing cuts to the refugee program. The moves brought wave after wave of uncertainty and chaos to the lives of refugees and those who work to help resettle them.

One of the largest nonprofit agencies that carry out this work, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, laid off a third of its staff in February and said Monday that it would end all of its refugee efforts with the federal government. A Jewish resettlement organization, HIAS, cut 40% of its staff. As the groups fight legal battles to recoup the millions of dollars the government owes them, some have been forced to close resettlement offices entirely.

The Nashville International Center for Empowerment is still struggling to keep its own afloat. Although NICE staff members had anticipated some cuts to refugee programs under Trump, they said they were caught off guard when reimbursements for money already spent failed to appear and by the dwindling opportunities to seek recourse.

After a judge ordered the Trump administration to restart refugee admissions, the administration responded by canceling contracts with existing resettlement agencies and announcing plans to find new partners. And the administration has indicated it will remain resistant, refusing to spend millions appropriated by Congress for refugees.

“Many have lost faith and trust in the American system because of this,” said Wooksoo Kim, director of the Immigrant and Refugee Research Institute at the University of Buffalo. “For many refugees, it may start to feel like it’s no different from where they came from.”

In court documents, lawyers for the Department of Justice argued the U.S. does not have the capacity to support large numbers of refugees.

“The President lawfully exercised his authority to suspend the admission of refugees pending a determination that ‘further entry into the United States of refugees aligns with the interests of the United States,’” the motion said.

In Nashville, that anxiety has been playing out week after week in tear-filled offices and in apartment complexes teeming with families who fled war and oppression.

Rykov couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed by the extreme shift in attitudes about immigrants in just a few years. In 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, his family’s dormant fears about Russia were reawakened — but they felt a surge of pride for the U.S. when it stepped up to help Ukraine and welcome its refugees.

Months after the invasion, Ukrainian athletes came to Birmingham for the World Games, which is similar to the Olympics. When they entered the stadium waving the Ukrainian flag, the crowd gave them a standing ovation. His parents, who’d never felt quite at home in the U.S., loudly joined in the “U-S-A” chant that followed.

But now, three years later, was all of America now ready to abandon refugees? Rykov was starting to see the signs, but he refused to believe it and instead recommitted himself to the work.

He and his colleagues reached out to every donor in their network and called an online meeting with local churches who might be able to help with rent payments, food, job searches and transportation.

Agencies would struggle without the help of the churches. And churches don’t have the resources, training or bandwidth to carry out the work of the agencies.

But Rykov knew that for the time being, he’d need more help than ever from church volunteers.

“Without your intervention here, this is gonna be a humanitarian disaster in Nashville,” he told them in the online meeting held about a week after the cuts. “And in every community, obviously, but we were focusing on ours. We’re not gonna be in a position to help in the same way much longer, and this is a stark reality that we’re facing.”

Then he went on the local news, warning that “this immediate funding freeze puts those recently arrived refugees really at risk of homelessness.” The responses on social media reflected the hate and intolerance that had polluted the national conversation about immigration.

“The common theme was, ‘Refugees? Do you mean “illegal invaders”?’” Rykov recalled. “People are so completely misinformed, clearly not reading the article or watching the story, and it’s very disappointing to see that. And I guess it’s sad too that I expect it.”

One Month After the Cuts “No Time to Screw Around”

In late February, church volunteer Abdul Makembe and a program manager from NICE squeezed into the cramped apartment of a family of five from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Both Makembe and NICE had been working with the family for months, but with the loss of funding, NICE could no longer offer support and had asked Makembe to be more involved.

Abdul Makembe, who immigrated from Tanzania, volunteers to help African families settle in the U.S. (Arielle Weenonia Gray for ProPublica)

A native of Tanzania, Makembe moved to Tennessee in the late 1970s. After working in infectious disease research and nonprofit management, which involved several trips to Africa, he retired in 2015 and began volunteering to help newly arrived African families. Rykov came to know him as a fixture of the refugee community, always eager to help.

In the apartment, Makembe perched on the edge of a couch and Mungaga Akilimali sat across from him on the floor.

“So, the situation has improved a little bit?” Makembe asked.

The Congolese man ran his hands over his head.

“The situation, so far, not yet,” Akilimali said. “I’m just trying to apply and reapply and reapply, but so far nothing.”

Akilimali and his family fled the Democratic Republic of Congo more than 10 years ago. Since 1996, soldiers and militias have killed 6 million people there and committed atrocities against countless civilians. War, political instability and widespread poverty have displaced millions of others.

Akilimali and his wife settled for a time in South Africa, where they encountered xenophobia and anti-immigrant violence. Immigrants and refugees have become political scapegoats there, spawning a rash of attacks and even murders. His wife, Bulonza Chishamara, nearly died there in 2018 after an ambush by an anti-immigrant mob.

Doctors gave her eight units of blood and Chishamara spent days paralyzed in a hospital bed, Akilimali said. She still walks with a limp.

The family had rejoiced when they got approved for refugee resettlement in 2024 in Tennessee. Their new life in Nashville began with promise. Akilimali, who speaks fluent English and trained as a mechanic, got a driver’s license and a job at Nissan.

However, he lost the job before his probationary period ended due to layoffs, and he hasn’t been able to find another one. NICE used to have a robust staff of employment specialists. But the cuts forced the organization to reassign them.

That left fewer resources for people like Akilimali, who had been in the U.S. longer than the three months during which new refugees were eligible for state department aid but who still needed help finding work.

For Rykov, the work of spreading awareness about the cuts and raising funds to offset them intensified throughout February. He and others working with refugees across the country were hoping that the courts might force the administration to release the federal money — that if they could keep things afloat in the short term, relief would come.

Then, on Feb. 25, a federal judge in Washington ruled in favor of the agencies. He ordered the administration to restore payments and restart refugee admissions.

The relief was short-lived. A day later, the administration canceled contracts with resettlement agencies, and lawyers for the administration have appealed the order. Their argument: The gutted refugee agencies no longer have capacity to restart resettlement, making it impossible to comply with court orders.

Rykov said some of the diminished number of remaining staff members began to look for new jobs.

After that, Rykov and his team kicked into emergency mode. They worked long hours making phone calls and arranging meetings with potential volunteers and donors.

“It was a cocktail of emotions,” he said. The generosity of donors and volunteers filled him with gratitude. But he couldn’t escape the sense of foreboding that consumed the office, where many desks sat empty and remaining employees voiced deepening concerns about the fates of their clients.

Rykov likened the urgent energy at NICE to the aftermath of a natural disaster. “There’s no time to screw around.”

At the same time, staffers worried about the cratering budget and the future of the organization. And it was hard not to notice how much the mood in Tennessee and around the country was shifting. In an order suspending refugee admissions, Trump described immigrants as a “burden” who have “inundated” American towns and cities.NICE had always felt protected, powered by an idealistic and diverse staff who chose to work in refugee resettlement despite the long hours and low pay. The cuts and the discourse eroded that sense of safety, Rykov said.

In February, a tech company offered him a job in Birmingham. It was a chance to be closer to his parents and back in the city where he’d come of age — a reminder of an era that felt kinder than the current one. He took the job.

“Working at NICE, it’s the best job I ever had and the most meaningful job I ever had,” he said.

Rykov packed up a few things from NICE. A Ukrainian flag lapel pin. A signed photograph of him and his coworkers. In his Birmingham apartment, he placed the picture on a bookshelf next to one of him and his parents at his high school graduation.

By the time he left, NICE’s refugee resettlement team was down to 30 employees; it had been 56 before the cuts. For its part, NICE has vowed to carry on. The organization has paired 24 families with volunteer mentors since the funding cuts.

Church volunteers, who were accustomed to helping furnish and decorate apartments for new arrivals, now had to help prevent evictions. They had to track down documents and help complete paperwork lost in the confusion of the nonprofit’s layoffs. And the group of mostly retired professionals now had to assist with the daunting task of finding unskilled jobs for refugees who didn’t speak much English.

Two Months After the Cuts One Volunteer, Many People in Need

On a mid-March morning, Makembe woke at 6 a.m. to begin tackling his volunteer work for NICE. Despite the long hours he clocks volunteering, the 74-year-old has kept his energy level and his spirits up. As he left the garage apartment he shares with his wife in a rough north Nashville neighborhood, he made sure to double-check the locks.

On this day, he was working not with the Akilimali family but with a family of four who recently arrived from Africa. The child needs to see a specialist at the Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt.

It was Vanderbilt that brought Makembe to Nashville decades ago, for his master’s degree in economic planning. He followed that with a doctorate in health policy and research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Over the years that followed, he made repeated trips back to Tanzania to do research on malaria and parasitic infections.

All that took a toll on Makembe’s marriage, and he and his first wife divorced when his two children were very young. They are now grown and successful. His son is an accountant and his daughter recently finished law school and works at a firm in New York. That leaves him more time to spend with refugees.

But the volunteer work does bring some financial stress. He is trying to save $5,000 to apply for a green card for his wife, which is tough. Because he spent much of his career working outside the U.S., Makembe receives less than $1,000 a month from Social Security. He drives a 2004 Toyota that was donated to his church to aid the congregation’s work with refugees, but he pays out of pocket for gas and car insurance. The costs can add up. It’s not uncommon for him to burn a quarter tank of gas a day when he is volunteering.

Makembe’s church, Woodmont Hills Church, is a significant contributor to the city’s refugee resettlement work — an ethos shared by its current congregants but that has led to the loss of members over the years. Though it had a congregation nearing 3,000 members in the late ’90s, attendance shrank as the church’s ideology grew more progressive and Tennessee’s grew more conservative. It’s now down to 800 members.

Yet the church remained steadfast in its commitment to helping refugees. Its leaders invited NICE to hold classes in its empty meeting rooms and made space to house a Swahili church and a Baptist church formed by refugees from Myanmar. And when NICE lost funding, Woodmont Hills members donated their time and money.

Makembe has helped dozens of refugees over the years but was particularly worried for the family he had to take to the Children’s Hospital that March morning, serving as both driver and translator. They arrived right before Trump cut off funding, and they had struggled to get medical care for their 5-year-old’s persistent seizures. A doctor at a local clinic had prescribed antiseizure medication, but it didn’t work, and the child experienced episodes where his muscles tensed and froze for minutes at a time.

Nashville has world-class medical facilities, but NICE no longer had staff available to help the family understand and navigate that care, leaving them frustrated.

It took months for the family to get in to see a specialist. During the long wait, Makembe said, the boy’s father began to lose hope. His son’s seizures had become longer and more frequent. Makembe stepped in to help them get a referral from a doctor at the local clinic.

The child’s father had to miss the doctor’s appointment that March morning so that he could go to an interview at a company that packages computer parts. Both he and his wife had been searching for jobs and striking out. Makembe has tried to help but has run into barriers. He does not have the same connections with labor agencies that NICE staffers did.

Makembe said he wants to get the child enrolled in a special school for the fall and find a wheelchair so his mom won’t have to carry him.

And that’s just this family. Makembe said new refugees have been waiting for months to get job interviews. When he visits the five families he mentors, their neighbors approach him asking for help. Many of their requests are for the assistance NICE and other refugee agencies once offered.

“I’m very much worried,” he said. “I mean, they have no idea of what to do.”

This post was originally published on ProPublica.

by Nicole Foy

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Just a week into President Donald Trump’s second term, Rep. Adriano Espaillat began to see reports of Puerto Ricans and others being questioned and arrested by immigration agents.

So Espaillat, a New York Democrat, did what members of Congress often do: He wrote to the administration and demanded answers. That was more than 10 weeks ago. Espaillat has not received a response.

His experience appears to be common.

At least a dozen members of Congress, all Democrats, have written to the Trump administration with pointed questions about constituents and other citizens whom immigration agents have questioned, detained and even held at gunpoint. In one letter, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee demanded a list of every citizen detained during the new administration.

None has received an answer.

“What we are clearly seeing is that with this administration, they are not responding to congressional inquiries,” said Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, a New Mexico Democrat.

Leger Fernández and others wrote to Trump and the Department of Homeland Security on Jan. 28 after receiving complaints from constituents and tribal nations that federal agents were pressing tribal citizens in New Mexico for their immigration status, raising concerns about racial profiling.

The congresswoman and others say the lack of response is part of a broader pattern in which the administration has been moving to sideline Congress and its constitutional power to investigate the executive branch.

“That is a big concern on a level beyond what ICE is doing,” Leger Fernández said, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a branch of DHS. “This administration does not seem to recognize the power and authority and responsibility” of Congress.

Norman Ornstein, a longtime congressional observer at the American Enterprise Institute, said prior administrations’ lack of responsiveness has frustrated lawmakers too. But he’s never seen one so thoroughly brush off Congress.

“What’s clear now is that the message from Donald Trump and his minions is: ‘You don’t have to respond to these people, whether they are ours or not,’” Ornstein said, referring to Republicans and Democrats. “That’s not usual. Nothing about this is usual.”

A White House spokesperson denied that the administration has been circumventing Congress or its oversight. “Passage of the continuing resolution that kept our government open and commonsense legislation like the Laken Riley Act are indicative of how closely the Trump administration is working with Congress,” said Kush Desai in a statement.

The White House did not answer questions about the letters. DHS also did not respond to ProPublica’s questions.

Last month, ProPublica detailed how Americans have been caught in the administration’s dragnet. Such mistakes have been made by many administrations over decades. The government often has not taken steps to reduce errors, such as updating its files when agents confirm somebody’s citizenship. But experts and advocates have warned that Trump’s aggressive immigration goals — including arrest quotas for enforcement agents — make it more likely that citizens will get caught up.

ICE and its sister agency, Customs and Border Protection, said in earlier statements to ProPublica that agents are allowed to ask for citizens’ identification. The agencies did not provide explanations for their actions in most of the cases ProPublica asked about.

Answers were also hard to come by during Trump’s first term, even when Democrats controlled the House and had more power over hearings.

At a House hearing in 2019 about family separation, lawmakers pressed then-Border Patrol Chief Brian Hastings about another issue: the three-week detention of a Dallas-born high school student and citizen, who was only released after The Dallas Morning News reported what happened.

Hastings said the student never claimed to be a citizen during his detention — though the newspaper reported that the agency’s own paperwork noted the opposite. Hastings also declined to give any broader accounting of how often the agency had held Americans. “I don’t have information about specific cases,” he said. (Hastings did not respond to requests for comment.)

Espaillat, the New York representative, has been in office for eight years. He said he frequently raised immigration questions and concerns during the Biden administration too, and got responses.

Republicans complained about the opposite experience during the Biden administration. They said the administration was unresponsive to Congress’ questions on immigration, forcing lawmakers to subpoena officials for answers. (The administration dismissed the moves as “political posturing.”)

Espaillat said he’s not surprised the Trump administration has been silent. “They probably don’t have a good answer.”

This post was originally published on ProPublica.

by Hannah Allam

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

With a line of cars waiting behind them at the train station, the two women hugged tightly as they said goodbye at the end of a spring break that hadn’t turned out to be the relaxing vacation they’d imagined.

Their girls trip had transformed into endless conversations about security precautions as one of the friends, 30-year-old Turkish national Rümeysa Öztürk, grew increasingly worried she would become a target of the Trump administration’s deportation campaign.

Öztürk, a former Fulbright scholar in a doctoral program at Tufts University, was stunned to find out in early March that she had been targeted by a pro-Israel group that highlighted an op-ed she co-wrote last year criticizing the school’s response to the war in Gaza.

Her concern deepened days later with the detention of former Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent resident the government is trying to deport over his role in pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus.

By the time of Öztürk’s spring break trip on March 15, she was consumed with anxiety, said her friend E., an Arab American academic on the East Coast who asked to withhold her name and other identifying details for security reasons.

During their reunion in E.’s hometown, the first time they’d been together since the summer, the friends looked up know-your-rights tutorials and discussed whether Öztürk should cut short her doctoral program. They spent their last day together filling out intake forms for legal aid groups — just in case.

Right up until their last minutes together at the train station, they wrestled with how cautious Öztürk should be when she returned to Massachusetts. Öztürk wondered if she should avoid communal dinners, a feature of Muslim social life during the holy month of Ramadan.

“I told her to keep going out, to be with her community. I wanted her to live her life,” E. recalled, her voice breaking.

“And then she got abducted in broad daylight.”

By now, much of the country has seen the footage of Oztürk’s capture.

Surveillance video from March 25 shows her walking to dinner in Somerville, Massachusetts, near the Tufts campus, chatting on the phone with her mother when she is swarmed by six masked plainclothes officers. Öztürk screams.

Within three minutes, she’s bundled into an unmarked car and whisked away, a jarring scene that showed the nation what President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign looks like on the street level: federal agents ambushing a Muslim woman who co-wrote an op-ed in a college newspaper.

The footage drew worldwide outrage and turned Öztürk into a powerful symbol of the Department of Homeland Security dragnet.

Surveillance Video of Rümeysa Öztürk’s Capture (Obtained by ProPublica)

Watch video ➜

To piece together what’s happened since then, ProPublica examined court filings and interviewed attorneys and Öztürk’s close friend, who regularly speaks to her in detention. What emerges is a more intimate picture of Öztürk and how a child development researcher charged with no crime ended up in a crowded cell in Louisiana. The interviews and court records also provide a glimpse into a sprawling, opaque apparatus designed to deport the maximum number of people with minimum accountability.

Her lawyers describe it as the story of a Trump-era rendition, a callback to the post-9/11 practice of federal agents grabbing Muslim suspects off the street and taking them to locations known for harsh conditions and shoddy oversight.

Öztürk is among nearly 1,000 students whose visas have been revoked, according to a tally by the Association of International Educators. And she is among several students and professors who have been detained.

Her detention was exceptional, immigration attorneys said, because it was caught on camera. What’s scariest, they say, is how fast the removals happen and how little is known about them.

Homeland Security spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment.

The video of Öztürk’s arrest surfaced because Boston-area activists had set up a hotline for locals to report interactions with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The call that came in about Öztürk reported a “kidnapping,” said Fatema Ahmad of the Muslim Justice League, part of the advocacy network that obtained the footage.

“What broke me was her screaming. And knowing that the same thing had just happened to almost 400 people in the Boston area the week before,” she said, referring to a recent six-day ICE operation.

After her arrest, Öztürk was held by ICE incommunicado for nearly 24 hours, her attorneys said, during which time she suffered the first of four asthma attacks.

Only later, through court filings and conversations with Öztürk, her attorneys learned that in the course of a single night she was taken from Massachusetts to New Hampshire and then Vermont, where the next morning, she was loaded onto a plane and flown to an ICE outpost in Alexandria, Louisiana.

Her last stop was a detention center in Basile about an hour away, where she remains, one of two dozen women in a damp, mouse-infested cell built to hold 14, according to court filings.

ICE officials say in court documents they couldn’t find a bed for Öztürk in New England, adding that out-of-state transfers are “routinely conducted after arrest, due to operational necessity.”

Immigration attorneys say the late-night hopscotch was an ICE tactic to complicate jurisdiction and thwart legal attempts to stop Öztürk’s removal. Louisiana and Texas, they say, are favored destinations because the courts there are viewed as friendlier to the Trump administration’s MAGA agenda, issuing decisions limiting migrant rights.

“It was like a relay race, and she was the baton,” Öztürk’s attorney Mahsa Khanbabai said.

“Whole Other Level of Terror”

On March 4, two weeks before their spring break reunion, Öztürk texted her friend E. to say she’d been “doxxed” by Canary Mission, part of an array of shadowy, right-wing Jewish groups that are criticized for using cherry-picked statements and distorted context to portray even mild criticism of Israel as antisemitism or support for terrorism.

For more than a decade, hard-line pro-Israel groups have publicized the names of pro-Palestinian activists, academics and students, often with scant or dubious “evidence” to back allegations of anti-Jewish bigotry. The goal, civil liberties advocates say, is to silence protesters through campaigns that have cost targets jobs and led to death threats. On its website, Canary Mission said it is “motivated by a desire to combat” antisemitism on college campuses. It says it investigates individuals and groups “across the North American political spectrum, including the far-right, far-left and anti-Israel activists.”

The effort was stepped up during the wave of student protests that erupted in opposition to the war in Gaza.

Öztürk’s entry on the Canary Mission site, posted in February, claims she “engaged in anti-Israel activism in 2024,” citing the op-ed she co-wrote more than a year ago that accused Tufts of ignoring students’ calls to divest from companies with ties to Israel over human rights concerns.

“I can not believe how much time people have,” Öztürk texted her friend when she saw the post.

E. responded with an open-mouthed “shocked” emoji. The Canary Mission entry, she said, had unlocked “a whole other level of terror” for Öztürk.

“It was that feeling of having your privacy be so violated — for people to spend all this time and energy on one op-ed,” E. said.

The op-ed published in The Tufts Daily was signed by four authors, including Öztürk, and endorsed by more than 30 other unnamed students. The language echoed the statements of United Nations officials and international war crimes investigators about the death toll in Gaza, which according to health officials there has passed 50,000, with about a third of the casualties under 18.

Öztürk, an advocate for children in communities plagued by violence, was personally heartsick over images of burned and mangled Palestinian children. But she was not a prominent activist or a fixture at campus protests, her friends and attorneys say.

Öztürk’s attorneys, who are scheduled to appear Monday before a federal judge in Vermont, say the sole basis for revoking her visa appears to be the op-ed highlighted by Canary Mission.

Ramzi Kassem, a lawyer representing Öztürk, said pro-Israel groups are providing the administration with lists of targets for its deportation campaign against noncitizen student protesters. “The sequence of events,” he said, “is op-ed, doxxing, detention.”

Pro-Israel groups, including Canary Mission, have boasted about their influence on the Trump administration’s targeting of student protesters. Immigration officials insist that they make their own removal decisions based on a number of factors, including a hard line on criticism of Israel.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he has revoked more than 300 student visas, including for Khalil and Öztürk, under the Immigration and Nationality Act, which permits the deportation of noncitizens who are deemed “adversarial to the foreign policy and national security interests” of the United States.

“We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist who tears up our university campuses,” Rubio told a news conference last month in response to a question about Öztürk’s detention. “Every day I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.”

A spokesperson said the State Department does not comment on ongoing litigation.

In a call with reporters on Thursday, attorney Marc Van Der Hout of Khalil’s legal team said the authority Rubio cites was intended for rare occasions involving high-level diplomatic matters, “not to be used to go after people for First Amendment-protected activity.”

Overnight Odyssey

Surrounded by masked officers on March 25, Öztürk had no idea who was seizing her or where she was being taken, according to a statement filed on Thursday in federal court. The operatives were dressed in civilian clothes, she wrote, so at first she worried they were vigilantes spurred by Canary Mission.

“I had never seen police approach and take someone away like this,” she wrote. “I thought they were people who had doxxed me and I was afraid for my safety.”

Öztürk’s statement details her harrowing night being shuttled across New England with little food after a day of fasting for Ramadan. She describes being shackled by her feet and stomach and then driven to different sites for meetings with unidentified men, some in uniform and some not. One group so unsettled her, Öztürk wrote, that she “was sure they were going to kill me.”

At another stop, described in the statement as an isolated parking lot, Öztürk repeatedly asked an officer if she was in physical danger.

“He seemed to feel guilty and said ‘we are not monsters,’” Öztürk wrote.

At the last stop in Vermont, Öztürk wrote, she arrived famished and with “a lot of motion sickness from all the driving.” Officers took her biometric data and a DNA sample.

She would stay there for the night, in a cell with just a hard bench and a toilet. Officers gained access to her cellphone, she wrote, including personal photos of her without her religious headscarf.

“During the night they came to my cell multiple times and asked me questions about wanting to apply for asylum and if I was a member of a terrorist organization,” Öztürk wrote. “I tried to be helpful and answer their questions but I was so tired and didn’t understand what was happening to me.”

Around 4 the next morning, she wrote, she was shackled again in preparation for a trip to the airport. She was told the destination was Louisiana. Her statement to the court recounts the parting words of one of her jailers: “I hope we treated you with respect.”

At nearly every stage of her detention, Öztürk, who takes daily preventative medication for asthma, experienced asthma attacks, which she says are triggered by fumes, mold or stress, court files say.

During one in Louisiana, Öztürk wrote, a nurse took her temperature and said, “You need to take that thing off your head,” before removing her hijab without asking. When Öztürk protested, the nurse told her, “This is for your health.”

By her fourth wheezing episode, Öztürk wrote, she didn’t bother to seek attention from her jailers in Louisiana: “I didn’t feel safe at the medical center.”

After the portrait Öztürk paints of ICE detention, her statement turns back to her old life, a reminder of how abruptly her world has shifted. From her cell in Louisiana, she described the plans she had in the coming months. Completing her dissertation. A conference in Minnesota. Students to mentor. A summer class to teach.

“I want to return to Tufts to resume all of my cherished work,” she concluded.

Reunion Interrupted

Öztürk and E. bonded in 2018 after meeting at a Muslim study group in New York, where they were both attending Columbia University.

They were in their 20s then, two bookish cat lovers who were serious about their studies and their faith. They went on nature walks and liked afternoon naps.

“Old ladies,” E. said with a laugh.

They remained close and took turns visiting after Öztürk left for Tufts and E. moved away from the city. Over the years, the pressures of grad school and distance had made their visits less frequent, E. said, so they’d been looking forward to their three-day spring break catch-up.

During the visit, E. said, the women broke their fast together and visited a mosque for late-night Ramadan prayers. They stopped by a children’s library Öztürk wanted to visit. They stayed up late talking, gaming out how to keep Öztürk safe from the Trump administration’s crackdown.

“She said, ‘I think this is going to be the last time I get to visit you,’” E. recalled. “I told her, ‘No, no, you’re going to be able to come again, don’t worry, and I’m going to come visit you.’ That all turned out to be wrong.”

The friends had kept in touch daily after parting at the train station. They exchanged mundane texts and voice notes about doing taxes and eating cookies. E. sent Öztürk a photo of the park where they had walked during their visit. “Rümeysa! The trees are starting to bloom again,” she wrote.

They last texted on March 25, a couple hours before Öztürk was detained on the way to dinner in Somerville.

E. didn’t find out what happened until the next morning, when she stumbled out of bed before dawn for the early meal Muslims eat before the daily Ramadan fast. Sipping her tea, E. scrolled through her phone and spotted a message that said, “Have you seen this?” alongside an alert about Öztürk’s arrest.

“It was like: ‘Is this real? Am I still asleep?’” she recalled.

E. said the idea of her gentle friend being swept into ICE custody still didn’t seem real until later that morning, when the video was released and she saw a familiar figure, in the same white jacket she’d worn on her visit.

“It was utterly nauseating to watch,” E. said. “So horrifying and so heartbreaking to see her have to be so violently taken that way.”

E. and Öztürk (Courtesy of E.) Trying to Be a “Good Detainee”

Two days after Öztürk’s transfer to Louisiana, E. received a call from a strange number that came up on her phone as “Prison/Jail.” It was Öztürk, in the first of what would become regular check-ins at random times of the day.

In interviews, E. showed ProPublica corroborating photos, text messages and voice notes of her interactions with her friend.

“She always starts with, ‘Is this a good time to talk?’ And I’m, like, ‘I’ve been waiting for this,’” E. said.

Some days, Öztürk sounds upbeat. Turkish diplomats, she told E., had delivered her a new hijab. Öztürk found a cookbook and noted a citrus salad recipe she might try someday. She cracked jokes about being too old to climb into a bunk bed every night.

In one call, Öztürk expressed relief that she’d filed her taxes before getting detained — a perfect example, E. said, of her overachieving friend’s wry sense of humor.

“She read the detainee handbook two times,” E. said. “She said, ‘I’m trying to be a good detainee.’”

Other calls are not as easy, E. said, adding that she didn’t want to divulge specifics out of respect for her friend’s privacy. In those harder talks, E. said, she wishes she could “be there to tell her it’ll be OK, give her a hug.”

Their conversations are sprinkled with reminders that Öztürk’s nightmare might not end soon. She asked for help canceling appointments and returning library books. She’s also in the process of requesting a single paperback, per detention regulations.

If approved, she wants E. to find her a guide for writing children’s literature, preferably with exercises she could do from her cell. E. said her heart ached when Öztürk asked her to make the book a long one.

The calls and tasks ease feelings of helplessness, E. said, an antidote for the guilt that sneaks up on her when she walks outside on a sunny day.

“How is it that we’re moving forward,” she said, “while my closest friend is rotting in this place?”

This post was originally published on ProPublica.