THURSDAY: A graduate student, then MS-13!

THURSDAY, MARCH 27, 2025

A tale of two arrests: On its face, the first arrest—the first arrest of the two arrests—had an ugly, sinister feel.

In its news report on that first arrest, the New York Times seemed to downplay that part of the event. You had to read all the way to paragraph 16 to encounter this description:

Federal Government Detains International Student at Tufts

[...]

A video circulating on social media on Wednesday showed a woman in a hijab and white coat being surrounded on a sidewalk, handcuffed and led away by masked plainclothes officers driving unmarked cars.

The Massachusetts attorney general, Andrea Joy Campbell, said her office was “closely monitoring this matter as it develops.”

She added: “The footage of Rumeysa Ozturk’s arrest—a student here legally—is disturbing. Based on what we now know, it is alarming that the federal administration chose to ambush and detain her, apparently targeting a law-abiding individual because of her political views...”

The graduate student was taken away by men in masks—by six such men with no visible ID. In more of the police state-adjacent culture now surfacing across the landscape, this young woman has been flown—where else?—to Louisiana, far from the site of her largely unexplained Massachusetts arrest.

Was she really arrested "because of her political views," as the Massachusetts attorney general said? More specifically, was she arrested for co-writing an opinion column in the Tufts student newspaper—a column which failed to agree with current U.S. foreign policy concerning events in Gaza? 

(The column referred to a "genocide." You aren't supposed to think that!)

So far, no other reason for the arrest has been revealed. For the record, the student hardy seems like a hardened terrorist:

While studying psychology as an undergraduate at Istanbul Sehir University, Ms. Ozturk worked closely with one of her professors, Fatima Tuba Yaylaci, in the psychology lab and as a student assistant. Ms. Ozturk was interested in child development and how children understand concepts like death and life, the professor said.

“She is a person who wouldn’t hurt a soul,” Ms. Yaylaci said in an interview on Wednesday. “She is extremely sensitive about human rights, about not hurting people, about diversity. She is a person who wants to include everyone.”

The professor said they had never discussed Palestinians during their time together, before Ms. Ozturk received a Fulbright scholarship and enrolled in a master’s program at Columbia University’s Teachers College, where she received a degree in 2020. “Her relations with people were really good, but she was not an organizational, activist-type leader in terms of politics,” Ms. Yaylaci said.

A couple of weeks ago, the professor said, she received a message from Ms. Ozturk, asking her to remove pictures of her with friends from the social media account of the lab. Ms. Ozturk told her she was being doxxed, meaning that personal information about her was being posted maliciously online.

“This is a very hard day for me too, I am very sad,” Ms. Yaylaci said. “I hope this issue will be resolved. She is such a valuable researcher for children in Turkey and in the U.S. too.”

In the end, will it turn out that there is something more behind this "police state"-style arrest? Or is this arrest a companion to Secretary Noem's visit yesterday to that now-famous Central American gulag? That is, was this first arrest designed to strike fear in the hearts of foreign nationals in the U.S., even including those who are in this country legally and are breaking no laws?

Will there be more to this ugly arrest? Only time will tell. That said, a brutal mentality has perhaps seemed to surface all through the penumbra of emanations from the current administration in Washington. 

Yesterday, that mentality was signaled as a half dozen men, faces hidden by masks, took a young woman off the street, then drove her away in unmarked cars and shipped her way down south. Even as this arrest was occurring, Secretary Noem was parading around inside the gulag, creating bizarre video for domestic consumption straight out of Apocalypse Now.

In the end, we find it hard to believe that images of this first arrest are really going to sell. But then again, there's that second arrest—the arrest which was announced in a live event at 9 o'clock this morning.

We watched the live event on the Fox News Channel. Then we read this news report, dual headline included:

Top MS-13 leader arrested in Virginia
Authorities made the arrest just south of Washington, DC

U.S. authorities have captured the MS-13 top leader for the U.S. East Coast, the FBI announced on Thursday.

Officials captured the 24-year-old suspect in Woodbridge, Virginia, just south of Washington, D.C. Authorities have yet to release the suspect's name, but they say he is one of the top three leaders of the MS-13 gang in the U.S.

Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel watched the arrest unfold from a nearby tactical operations center. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and senior DOJ official Emil Bove were also present.

"They executed a clean, safe operation and the bad guys in custody. And thanks to the FBI, we got one of the worst of the worst of the MS-13 off the streets this morning. Virginia and the country is a lot safer today," Bondi told Fox News following the arrest.

As with the first of these two arrests, so too with the second. The full story of this arrest hasn't yet been told.

That said, the event we watched at 9 o'clock involved a lot of powerful messaging from Bondi and Patel, and from Virginia Governor Youngkin. The bragging and boasting were strong. 

So were the accusations of lethargy directed at the Biden administration, which had allegedly let this suspect, and many other such individuals, cross the border with little resistance during the past four years.

As time passes, how will the facts of these two arrests play out? We can't tell you that. We can say that Blue America has a fair amount of explaining to do and a whole lot to figure out. Unfortunately, we sometimes seem to remain locked in a bit of denial concerning our recent ways.

An international student got frog-marched away by masked men in unmarked cars. Allegedly, a top leader of what everyone describes as a vicious gang was arrested the very next day.

In the gulag, it was Apocalypse Now. By the way:

Were the alleged gang members we shipped to that place actual gang members? Were they actual killers and rapists and terrorist monsters?

Karoline Leavitt swears they all were. But then, of course, she would!

Also this question lingers—on what authority can we render people into that Central American gulag? This isn't your father's "deportation." What gives us the legal right to ship people away like that—not to their actual countries of origin, but instead to a third country with a brutal third world feel?

On Fox & Friends, the friends were highly enthusiastic after the Bondi presser. They also discussed the footage generated by Kristi Noem Down Under.

Were the alleged gang members correctly accused? The accused had been afforded no due process, and on Fox, the friends didn't ask!