By various accounts, Rumeysa Ozturk is a good student and a decent person. She was a Fulbright scholar from Turkey who earned a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Teachers College. She was working on a doctorate at Tufts University’s Department of Child Study and Human Development when she was arrested by masked plainclothes officers, handcuffed, shackled and transported, eventually, to an ICE detention center in Louisiana, where she is being held in austere conditions.

On Wikipedia, Ozturk’s friends report that she was “sweet, kind and gentle,” “soft spoken” and never “discriminatory towards anyone.” Her university department described her as a “valued member of our community” whose “genuineness and care for others have been deeply felt here at Tufts.”

She looks the part: Her pictures reveal a smiling, pleasant-looking woman in a hijab, wearing the prominent eyeglasses of a scholar.

But I haven’t bothered to verify these details. Why? Because they don’t matter. Any more than they matter for Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

Recently I wrote a column objecting to the detention of Abrego Garcia, an El Salvadoran who had been living legally in Maryland for 13 years. The Trump administration admitted his deportation to El Salvador was an administrative error, but it refuses to comply with a Supreme Court directive to “facilitate” his return, based largely on the unsupported allegation that Abrego Garcia is affiliated with the MS-13 gang.

Some readers objected to my defense of Abrego Garcia, arguing that the undocumented and criminals don’t deserve due process.

But this idea shouldn’t be so hard to understand: In our system, criminals, above all others, need due process, and we give it to them (or, at least, we did) not only because of our constitutional obligation, but also to preserve it for ourselves.

In other words, by denying anyone, good or bad, access to due process, we are imperiling our own.

Neither Abrego Garcia nor Ozturk has been charged with anything. Ozturk’s only offense appears to have been co-authoring an opinion piece in the Tufts student newspaper that is critical of Israel’s current policies in Gaza.

Anyone interested in free speech should read the opinion piece. Its purpose is to criticize Tufts’ administration for its casual dismissal of several student senate resolutions, which, the coauthors say, were the product of “meaningful debate.”

The resolutions represent an attempt “to hold Israel accountable for clear violations of international law,” including, the writers contend, “deliberate starvation,” “indiscriminate slaughter” and “plausible genocide.”

Throughout, the prose is measured and evenhanded. The article doesn’t call for the destruction of Israel, doesn’t mention “from the river to the sea” and expresses no support for Hamas.

In short, it’s an opinion that uses language very similar to that available to any citizen who wishes to criticize Israel’s policies in Gaza.

Ozturk’s chances of deportation appear to be significant. Too bad. What she could have learned in U.S. universities about children, teaching and human development might be valuable back in Turkey.

But here’s what I wish she could have learned here and taken home with her:

In 2007, Thomas Friedman, Middle East expert and New York Times columnist, said that the first thing he would do to change Iran’s behavior would be to grant 50,000 student visas for young Iranians to study in U.S. universities.

Why? Because when students come here, especially from repressive theocracies or autocracies, they witness something remarkable: They discover a land that is much freer than their home countries, a place where citizens can come and go as they please; where the rule of law reigns; where women are seen as equals (mostly); and where LGBTQ+ citizens are treated with tolerance and respect.

And, most wonderful, a country that has enough confidence in itself and respect for free speech that anyone is allowed to speak out without fear of being abducted, shackled and silenced.

That’s the country that I wish the bright, young Rumeysa Ozturk could have told her fellow Turks about, the country we used to be. They might have found something to admire, to their benefit and to ours.

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