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Some keen insight from a NY Times piece:

"The footage of Rumeysa Ozturk’s arrest is a familiar sight for those of us who lived in countries with authoritarian regimes. In the video, Ozturk, a Turkish woman completing her Ph.D. studies at Tufts University, is approached on a sidewalk in Sommerville, Mass., by several plainclothes officers from the Department of Homeland Security while she was on her way to break her Ramadan fast with friends on Tuesday night. One hooded officer grabs her hands and arms as another officer, masked, approaches from her side. Clearly afraid, Ozturk is eventually handcuffed and taken to a black S.U.V.

This isn’t an isolated event: Ozturk is just the latest international student to have been picked up or targeted this way by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the last month; the common through line to many of the cases is their participation in speech or protests against the war in Gaza, actions that are otherwise protected under this country’s free speech laws. As of Wednesday evening, Ozturk, who had a student visa, had been moved to Louisiana, and her lawyer said that, to her knowledge, Ozturk had not been charged with a crime.

It’s important to consider why ICE officers are making these arrests under the guise of immigration violations. Of the students targeted in similar fashion, none are charged with a crime, as far as we know. Rather, the federal government is utilizing a rarely used section of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows the secretary of state to deport noncitizens who could have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

How broadly that could be interpreted under this administration is anyone’s guess. The government has provided very little public information in these cases about what exactly the students allegedly did to undermine U.S. foreign policy. And in an alarming sign, this process has involved not just student visa holders, but also green card holders.

Now, with the Trump administration’s broad use of ICE, it seems as if a precedent is being set: Any noncitizen can face the same type of political detentions we associate with regimes abroad.

Were Ozturk or others arrested by local or state police officers, they’d have much more due process. They could ask for bail. They could not be moved across state lines without reason and held indefinitely in federal detention facilities, as Mahmoud Khalil, Badar Khan Suri and Ozturk currently are while pursuing legal appeals.

Politically motivated detentions and deportations aren’t the only way the Trump administration is pushing the legal boundaries of ICE’s purview. The families of several Venezuelan men seeking asylum say the men were wrongfully arrested and deported to a Salvadorean mega prison because they were mistakenly thought to be associated with the Tren de Aragua gang. In those deportations, too, the administration has invoked a little-used law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, declaring the gang an enemy of the nation to speed up deportations of Venezuelan migrants with very little due process.

Effectively, these types of arrests could transform ICE into an extrajudicial force, one that could hold any noncitizen — regardless of the individual’s legal status — under an increasingly opaque and authoritarian set of laws. You could be in this country legally, even invited here on a Fulbright scholarship, as Ozturk was, and, without being accused of a crime, be taken off the street. Even though Ozturk’s arrest is a familiar sight to many, it’s difficult to believe that it’s happening here, today, in America."