The knock on the door startled the small group of international students gathered after hours in a lecture theatre on the University of Michigan campus in late March.
The meeting was billed as an opportunity for students to process their feelings and “find healing” over what it described as “recent changes in the U.S. immigration landscape.” Clearly anxiety was running high; when I entered, notebook in hand, a university employee quickly ushered me outside. She said the students were shaken by what they had seen in the news. They didn’t want to speak in front of a journalist.
The day before, social media was flooded with video of the dramatic arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish international student at Tufts University in Massachusetts. The co-author of an opinion piece that defended pro-Palestinian protests, Ms. Ozturk was stopped on the street by masked officers in plain clothes, handcuffed and bundled into an unmarked vehicle. The arrest occurred about two and a half weeks after the apprehension …