What did Donald Trump do today?

He said op-eds in student newspapers were grounds for disappearance and deportation.

On Tuesday, Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk was abruptly surrounded on a Somerville, MA street by ICE agents wearing masks and hoodies, but nothing to identify themselves as law enforcement. 

Video of her being swiftly handcuffed and hustled away was, for almost two days, the only information anyone—including her lawyers—had of her whereabouts. It later became clear that the Turkish student, a Fulbright scholar with a valid student visa to pursue a Ph.D. in child development, was shipped in haste to a Louisiana detention facility, apparently in defiance of a judge's order to keep her in Massachusetts. 

The Trump administration has been taking the targets of its most controversial and legally questionable detentions to that facility because that puts it in the jurisdiction of the Fifth Circuit Court, where it feels legal challenges are less likely to succeed.

Ozturk has not been accused of any crime, but she did co-write an anodyne editorial that appeared in the Tufts student newspaper last year. In it, she and other students called on the Tufts University administration to respect and engage with the requests of its student government, which had passed several resolutions regarding Tufts' approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ozturk wrote that Tufts' response to those resolutions was dismissive and condescending. The editorial did not discuss the conflict itself.

Today, Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed on behalf of the Trump administration that Ozturk had been arrested, shackled, and hastily sent more than 1,000 miles away without legal counsel or any other form of due process because she caused "a ruckus." 

Rubio claimed, without evidence, that she had acted "in support of Hamas," but the Trump administration has said that about virtually everyone who has in any way deviated from its particular stance on Israel—including, for example, New York Senator Chuck Schumer, a staunchly pro-Israel Jewish Democrat. 

“We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas,” Rubio added, apparently in reference to other people legally present in the United States whose views Trump disagrees with.

The protections of the First Amendment apply to non-citizens. Trump, however, insists that all non-citizens legally residing in the United States are there at his sufferance, and can be detained and deported to their home countries or unrelated third countries for any reason or no reason.

Trump himself has not been seen in public or made available to reporters since yesterday, when he became confused about the details of the unfolding security breach scandal and was unaware of the widely reported disappearance and apparent death of four American soldiers in Lithuania.

Thousands of people protested Ozturk's detention today at Tufts.

Why does this matter?

• The only reason to do this is to scare people into not exercising their freedom of speech.

• It is not illegal or disruptive to have opinions Donald Trump doesn't like.

• A government that cares about freedom is not afraid of the due process of law.