Rumeysa Ozturk, the Turkish PhD student who was detained by the US President Donald Trump’s administration earlier this year, has recalled her harrowing detention, saying she was "thrust into a nightmare" when she was abruptly swept off the streets by masked agents.
During her six-and-a-half weeks of detention in a for-profit Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) prison, Ozturk said she was largely kept in a small cell with 23 women from a broad range of countries with whom she developed a bond of solidarity.
"We each found ourselves trapped in our own individual nightmares, but we found comfort and relief in one another, and we shared the burden and pain by listening to each other," she wrote in a Vanity Fair op-ed on Thursday.
"Each conversation turned into a group therapy session where we would gather to open up about the grief we felt regarding the harsh realities and dehumanisation occurring in a godforsaken for-profit ICE prison in America, a place we had all come to pursue our dreams," she added.
Ozturk, a Tufts University graduate student, had her visa revoked without her knowledge on the grounds that she co-authored an op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper demanding that the school acknowledge the Palestinian genocide in Gaza.
Ozturk's attempted deportation is one of several sought by the Trump administration as it seeks to crack down on pro-Palestinian sentiment on university campuses.
She was snatched off the streets by masked immigration agents and put into a van in March. She was then quickly taken out of Somerville, Massachusetts, before being flown to a series of locations that culminated in a detention centre in the southern state of Louisiana, thousands of miles away from her home.
Ozturk suffers from asthma and said she was forced to live in conditions that made her condition "significantly worse." During one asthma attack, officers would not respond until her fellow cellmates "began banging on the windows to get their attention."
"Afterward, I was not even allowed to take a few minutes of fresh air, being told that it was a risk to the officers’ safety," she said.
The incident was part of what Ozturk described as a larger pattern in which detainees had their medical concerns outrightly dismissed by staff or were given insufficient care to address their ailments. That included giving out Ibuprofen to women suffering from a litany of issues, from cancer to colds.
The medicine was "the magical pill the medical staff offered," Ozturk said sarcastically.
On the day before her bail hearing in May, Ozturk said she left a letter for her cellmates to find, "expressing my gratitude to each of these women for being the wonderful people they are: compassionate, kind, and remarkable individuals despite the countless challenges we faced every moment."
"They held onto their dignity and humanity while making a conscious choice to be caring and loving. They uplifted each other, staying strong even when the circumstances were unimaginably challenging," she noted.
"I learned from them that even in the most inhumane conditions, human dignity cannot be stripped away from human beings unless they decide to give up. I learned from these strong women what solidarity looks like," she added.
