LUCE documented the March 25 abduction of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish Tufts University PhD student on a valid visa, who was surrounded by masked plainclothes officers in Somerville, handcuffed, and hustled into an unmarked car.
In part because of LUCE’s swift activation of a legal response to Öztürk’s detention, and their gathering and sharing of the documentary evidence of her unlawful arrest, a federal judge has now ordered that she be returned to Vermont from an ICE facility in Louisiana, where she was fast-tracked for deportation.
Öztürk’s legal team “has raised significant constitutional concerns with her arrest and detention,” the judge found.
Following the playbook first developed by human rights activists in the Latin American dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, and with the guidance of Siembra NC, a North Carolina-based immigrant rights nonprofit which has helped groups in multiple states establish hotlines, LUCE seeks to verify and document every potential case and raid, as quickly as possible, so that ICE agents – who have taken to hiding their names and affiliation during these raids – cannot operate in the shadows to detain lawful residents with impunity.
“Visibility is accountability,” says Danny Timpona, the Neighbor 2 Neighbor organizer who fielded the call to LUCE about Öztürk’s detention.
