Rümeysa Öztürk is Locked Up for an Op-ed: An Urgent Summit with the Student Newspaper that Published It

Where better to huddle up and discuss what to do about Rümeysa Öztürk and the chilling effect that is happening in journalism than on campus at Tufts University with the student journalists at The Tufts Daily?

This week Brian and Question Everything co-host a live event with the editor-in-chief and associate editor from The Tufts Daily– Arghya Thallapragada and Ellora Onion-De. Together they interview journalists and attorneys, including Carol Rose, one of Rümeysa’s lawyers and executive director of the ACLU to learn what all happened to Rümeysa, and why. What did her abduction by federal agents a month ago have to do with her immigration status as a Turkish graduate student studying child development, here on a student visa? Why did Secretary of State Marco Rubio say her Op-ed was cause for incarceration? Why is she still in ICE’s custody? And what happened to the constitutional protections around free speech and a free press that we depend on in a free society? 

Joined by former editor-in-chief of the Washington Post and Boston Globe Marty Baron, First Amendment lawyer Robert Bertsche and senior politics reporter at The Intercept, Akela Lacey, the group wrestles in real time with the gravity of this moment, not just for Rümeysa Öztürk, but for all of us.

Read the Op-ed Rümeysa and others wrote that ran in The Tufts Daily a year ago in March.

Watch the video of federal agents in plainclothes, forcing Rümeysa Öztürk into an SUV on March 25, 2025.

Quick thing: In our discussion Carol Rose says the ACLU has filed 100 legal actions in President Trump’s first 100 days. The specific count on those is actually higher: the ACLU filed 110 legal actions in the Trump administration’s first 100 days.

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“Question Everything” is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory.

Reporter Brian Reed re-examines everything about journalism, the profession he thought he knew. In the middle of making his second hit podcast, Brian got sued. Accused. Told the biggest story of his career — the Peabody Award-winning series S-Town — wasn’t journalism. Which meant he had to spend years proving that it was. Obsessing over the question, “What is journalism, anyway?”