A Tufts Student Abducted, Before Iftar
An essay about fasting, Ramadan, and masked government agents kidnapping a Tufts student on the way to an Iftar — a forced disappearance in broad daylight
Dear Friends!
Happy Liberation Day! I’ve been going hard on the restaurant reviews lately, so today, I bring you a few words about Val Kilmer, Southern corn sticks, halal food, and Trump’s efforts to purge international students who publicly oppose the war in Gaza.
If you’re so inclined, you can listen to my recent interview on The LA Food Podcast.
Ryan!
Not enough steaks in the freezer
Val Kilmer died on Tuesday. He was 65.
I liked him in everything. But I loved him in “Heat,” Michael Mann’s sprawling cops-and-robbers flick that’s really about men addicted to work.
Some of the characters in “Heat” do well for themselves. But a few of them are short on money.
Dennis Haysbert plays a short-order grill cook who’s forced to kick back a chunk of his take home pay to a corrupt floor manager. His story takes place over a brilliant series of interludes, and honestly, I wonder how the studio exec reacted. “Michael, you gave me a f&cking three-hour action movie, with people longingly staring out windows and a restaurant wage theft plot line!!! WTF??”
And then there’s Kilmer, a gambling junkie sleeping on the floor of De Niro’s beachside condo. Watching him wake up is like watching a terrycloth robe animate itself. It ambles up, takes a cup of coffee, and then slumps onto a midcentury pouf. Why was Kilmer’s wife leaving him in the movie? Something we can all relate to.
“Not enough steaks in the freezer,” he said. And then, he went back to work.
On Ramadan, and Trump’s Student Purge
Has the sun set yet?
I couldn’t say. My friend Jane — a fellow Long Islander — was sitting with me in international econ class. And she was asking whether dusk had set in. Skyline views were in short supply in those old GWU lecture halls.
Timing was key. It was Ramadan, a month of dawn-to-dusk fasting for billions of folks around the world. It was the fall of 2000, so smart phone notifications were still a few years away. Heck, most of my friends didn’t even have cell phones.
Also, there was no wifi on campus. I know, real prehistoric stuff, lol.
But the light outside was dimming. And another student was unwrapping a snack cake. Sounded like sunset to me. Jane agreed. She popped open a water bottle. And she took a drink.
My buddies would typically hit up Iftar dinners over at the student center, but like I said, we were in econ class that night. And it was time for Jane to get some fluids after a long day without food or water.
Ramadan isn’t supposed to be easy. It’s supposed to be meaningful. A time of charity and community. A time to experience “what it feels like to be hungry and thirsty,” so you can feel compassion for the needy, as Jennifer Williams wrote for Vox last year.
But it can be a challenging month at school.
That’s especially true now, as Trump continues his purge of international students who support Palestinian causes. The administration has been snatching students off the streets and plucking them from university-owned residences.
And the White House has promised more arrests.
Yet regardless of the political climate, the holy month can still be tough for students.
Unlike in certain Muslim-majority countries, schools don’t really adjust their hours here in the states. The faithful wake up early for Suhoor, a morning meal taken before daylight. And when night falls, they gather for Iftar, a time for eating and drinking during the evening call to prayer.
Not an easy regimen if you’re already sleep deprived. As so many students are.
School guidelines sometimes include testing accommodations. Those are often discretionary. So sure, an extra day would be nice for that calculus midterm, but sometimes, the solution is just a quick snack during sunset, as The Johns Hopkins News-Letter reports.
At Columbia, folks pick up pre-dawn Suhoor meals from assorted concession points. Very cool, though that’s not an option that New York University students have, as the Washington Square News reports. Yes, the NYU dining area stays open late during Ramadan, but that’s no replacement for free Iftars with friends at the Islamic center — an inaccessible option if you’re stuck in class, as student journalist Leila Olukoga writes. And that’s too bad.
For students far from home, a campus Iftar is a lifeline to one’s culture.
A campus Iftar is a way to feel less alone.
A campus Iftar is a place to be with like-minded people during a time of rising Islamaphobia. During a time when Trump contemplates (and delays) another Muslim travel ban. During a time when the death toll of the Gaza war tops 50,000.
During a time when the threat of a Palestinian famine looms.
Last week, Rumeysa Ozturk, an international grad student at Tufts University, was walking to an Iftar with friends. Like others observing Ramadan on the East Coast, she was fasting for a full 13 hours.
She did not reach her intended destination.
She was stalked, surrounded, and detained by plainclothes ICE officials, some of them in masks. It all unfolded in a surveillance video that millions of Americans have watched.
Her cell phone was confiscated. She was placed into an unmarked SUV. And her whereabouts were unknown for nearly a full day, according to her lawyers. The government revoked her visa, and renditioned her to an immigration facility 1,500 miles away in Louisiana. She reportedly had an asthma attack on the flight.
Whenever Ozturk ended up breaking fast, it was not with her community; it was in the custody of government officials seeking to deport her.
The U.S. has accused Ozturk of "engaging in activities in support of Hamas.”
Reuters, like other news organizations, reports that the administration has not provided any evidence in support of that.
The ACLU believes she is being targeted for a fairly routine op-ed she co-authored with three others for The Tufts Daily. That column is deeply critical of Israel, with mentions of “deliberate starvation” and “plausible genocide.” But it doesn’t even include the word Hamas — the group responsible for the Oct. 7 attack that killed 1,200 and took 250 hostage — let alone express any support for them.
So far, the State Department has revoked approximately 300 student visas, as part of Trump’s crackdown on student protests. “We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week.
One of those impacted was Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia graduate student and a spokesperson for campus demonstrators. The government revoked his green card. He now sits in a government detention center, also in Louisiana. You can read about the conditions of his confinement here, in the Wall Street Journal.
Is this even legal? That’s beyond the scope of this column, but the Trump administration has asserted that it can remove these individuals based on a 1952 law. Under that rule, people can be deported if their activities or presence carry “serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”
Rubio also suggested that people “need not have personally behaved in a disruptive fashion” to get kicked out of the country. It suffices if “like-minded” folks in a given movement had been “unruly,” Charlie Savage of the NYT wrote in an analysis.
That’s a pretty wide berth. But it gets wider.
Diplomats have now been ordered to scrutinize the social media accounts of student visa applicants, the NYT reports. Why is this necessary? To “reject the applications of those who have expressed sympathy for Palestinians during the war.”
Now you know.
The policy is also designed to reject applications from those who present a “hostile attitude toward U.S. citizens or U.S. culture (including government, institutions, or founding principles).”
This news comes less than two months after President Trump openly called for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and its redevelopment as a posh riviera.
Perhaps now, you’re even more curious about Ozturk’s arrest.
Maybe you’re wondering why masked agents forcibly disappeared a student on her way to break a 13-hour fast. It’s the type of law enforcement response one might expect for a high-value spy, or a violent narco-trafficker. Not a student who wrote an op-ed.
Ozturk’s own lawyers and the ACLU have a theory about what’s going on here.
“Rumeysa’s arrest and detention are designed to punish her speech and chill the speech of others,” they wrote in court filings. They are correct. The government’s overreaction isn’t an oversight or an accident.
The overreaction is the point.
The law enforcement response is straight out of a mob enforcer’s playbook. It’s meant to suggest that the person targeted must’ve done something so awful as to have deserved this type of punishment. It’s meant to send a message to all immigrants: If you publicly oppose Trump’s policies in the Middle East, we will deport you. If you participate in campus protests or write op-eds against the war in Gaza, we will deport you. But first, we will send you to an ICE facility where they’ll wake you up at 3:30 a.m. for breakfast.
You’d be forgiven for thinking the new guidelines will chill all sorts of speech among students, tourists, and other visitors.
The administration has moved to deport a Harvard Medical School researcher and Russian citizen who has publicly opposed Putin’s war against Ukraine. And a French government official said one of their scientists was denied entry after immigration officers found messages on his phone critical of Trump (the U.S. has offered…curious explanations for those two incidents).
That’s all to say: This is about more than foreign policy in the Middle East, which won’t be impacted by a single op-ed or two — or a private iPhone message intended for your significant other.
This is about what Trump fears. He’s scared of federal unions and their immense sway, which is why he’s working to kneecap them. He scared of trustworthy media companies, which is why he’s suing them. He’s worried about judges consistently ruling against him; heck, he’s already called for the impeachment of a prominent jurist. And he’s frightened by the collective power of student protest movements and opinion makers.
Trump’s actions are the work of a president moving to stifle domestic dissent.
If you ever get a chance to attend an iftar — and I hope you do because they’re warm and wonderful events — there’s a good chance someone might give you a date.
This is no small matter.
Before evening prayer — and before a longer meal — the faithful often break fast by eating the sweet stone fruit. And by drinking water. The dates carry a deep religious significance, though the fruit also has a natural practicality to it.
Dates help stabilize blood sugar after a fast. After so many hours, your body needs a little boost.
I can’t pretend to know how Ozturk broke her fasts in detention, but I reckon it wasn’t with dates or whatever else she was expecting to enjoy with friends.
Her arrest has shaken me deeply. Yes, she’s just a single human. And indeed, the U.S. will detain more international students in the weeks and months to come; Trump has confirmed that.
But there’s something so profoundly mean about disappearing a student — a Fulbright scholar presumably targeted for writing an op-ed — literally while she’s on her way to nourishing herself. After abstaining from food or water as long as the sun shined that day.
We’ve all fasted. For spirituality. For surgery. And sometimes, we’ve all yearned for food and company after spending too much time starting at a computer and forgetting to DoorDash something.
We all eat when we’re hungry. We all eat to stay alive. And yet our government saw these human desires and needs as weaknesses to be exploited. Ozturk’s hunger for her faith and her biological need to eat were weaponized against her in a targeted act of cruelty. Is it institutionalized Islamophobia? Of course it is, and it pains me to see that phenomenon rising alongside the scourge of antisemitism.
But Islamophobia feels too commonplace to describe what we all saw in that video.
To me, it was something even more sinister. It was a government-directed hate crime. It was an arrest meant to send a message: You’re not welcome here.
This is usually where I search my own mind for words of condemnation and a call to action, or warn about what could happen next. I won’t do that, because these events are so stark that they speak for themselves. We are not on the verge of something happening. We are in a place where this is happening. And it will continue.
Tashkent Supermarket has arrived in Manhattan!
Many of you know this already, but my beloved Tashkent Supermarket has opened in Greenwich Village! I haven’t been yet, but the Brighton Beach flagship boasts an absolutely grand hot buffet, replete with soft norin and crisp Central Asian pastries. It serves an extremely aromatic Uzbek plov, as I wrote for Eater NY in 2021.
I’ll test drive the new location sometime this spring or summer. In the meantime, check out Nat Belkov’s opening report from earlier in March. 378 Sixth Avenue, Greenwich Village
Beating uniformity with a corn stick
Here’s an admission: I didn’t know corn sticks existed until I read this fine missive by Farhan Mustafa in The Food Section.
Mustafa won a James Beard Award last year for his “Immigrant Spaghetti” essay in The Bitter Southerner, and so hopefully you’ll trust him to take you through this tasty side dish. Do read the whole thing — there are some interesting thoughts on “disappearing foods” — but let me tease you with the lede:
“My uncle, who ran his own Heating & A/C service, was the first to bring a bag of Parker’s corn sticks home. For my Muslim family, corn sticks were the safest food at a barbecue place besides slaw and boiled potatoes—the green beans had pork in them and we were cautious of cross-contamination. Even B’s barbecue chicken was off-limits when I was growing up.”
Kosher and halal meals to be required in Illinois schools
Illinois has become the first state in the nation to require that public institutions offer both halal and kosher meals upon request. Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed the bill on March 21. State institutions like schools, prisons, and hospital facilities have a year to come into compliance, Zareen Syed of the Chicago Tribune reports.
How Gazans Are Observing Ramadan This Year
Kindly read this Eater missive by Laila El-Haddad, author of “The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey”
Alright, I’ll get back to restaurant reviewing sooner than you know it.
And again, if you need a little talk radio in your life, I chat about some of my favorite stuff over at The LA Food Podcast. Expect to hear me talking about negative reviews, criticism versus reviewing (a big deal!), and the growth of The Infatuation.
Ryan!
This column has been updated with additional information and for clarity
Home run.
Thank you so much for this, Ryan.