At Press Conference, Lawmakers Shared Stories of Medical Neglect, Sleep Deprivation, Inadequate Food and Religious Accommodations, Cold Temperatures, Denial of Personal Necessities, and More

Video (YouTube)

BOSTON – Today, at Logan Airport in Boston, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (MA-07), Senator Edward J. Markey (D-MA) and Congressman James P. McGovern (MA-02) held a press conference to recount their harrowing visit to Louisiana where they met with Rümeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil at ICE detention centers. The lawmakers made the visit yesterday to ICE facilities in Basile and Jena, where Rümeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil are being unlawfully detained and subjected to inhumane conditions in retaliation for their protected speech.

Rep. Pressley, Senator Markey, and Rep. McGovern were joined by House Homeland Security Committee Ranking Member Bennie Thompson (MS-02) and Representative Troy Carter (LA-02) on the visit, which also included a meeting with Wendy Brito, an asylum-seeker from El Salvador and New Orleans-area resident who never returned from a regular check-in last month with ICE.

“Rümeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil are being unlawfully held in harrowing conditions at ICE facilities in Louisiana and enduring shameful indignities that no one person should ever have to – and yet they continue to center the dignity and humanity of all people,” said Rep. Ayanna Pressley (MA-07). “We will never stop fighting for Rümeysa, Mahmoud, and everyone who has been harmed by this cruel and callous White House. We reject Donald Trump’s draconian vision for our country, where dissenting voices are silenced and innocent people are disappeared off the street. He is a dictator, and the only way to beat a dictator is with defiance.”

“It’s no secret that the detentions of Rümeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil are part of an alarming trend by the Trump administration: abduct students and secret them away to remote prisons in jurisdictions where the Administration expects to receive favorable court rulings through its forum shopping. Neither Öztürk nor Khalil has been charged with a crime. When a government imprisons individuals based on their words, denies constitutional due process for political convenience, and cloaks oppression in the language of national security, we must ring the alarm bells loudly and clearly across this country. What the Trump administration is doing is not immigration enforcement – it is authoritarianism,” said Senator Markey. 

“What’s happening to Rümeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil is a chilling and dangerous violation of their human rights. They’ve committed no crimes, they’ve been charged with no offenses, and they’ve broken no laws. Let’s not mince words: They are political prisoners—held in detention by a government which seeks to punish them for their views and silence their speech. That is immoral and wrong,” said Congressman Jim McGovern, Co-Chair of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. “Their arbitrary detention and deprivation of due process is a violation not only of their constitutional rights, but also their rights under international human rights law. This starts with Rümeysa and Mahmoud—but it ends with you. Now is the time to speak out before it is too late. Unless we fight back, this administration will continue weaponizing the government to violate the human rights of those who dare to disagree. We cannot and will not accept this as the new normal.”

In Louisiana, the lawmakers held a media availability outside of the Basile facility to speak about their meetings, renew their calls for their release, demand accountability, and conduct oversight over the ICE facilities they are being held in. Full video of that media availability is available here.

A full transcript of Congresswoman Pressley’s remarks at the Boston press conference, as delivered, is available below and the full video is available here.

Transcript: Pressley Recounts Harrowing Visit with Rümeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil at ICE Facilities in Louisiana
Boston Logan Airport
April 23, 2025

Thank you all for being here today. Indeed, it was an honor to join my delegation partners, Senator Markey, Congressman McGovern, on this important congressional delegation. 

It was an honor, and it was also our responsibility. It was essential that we go, not only to conduct oversight, but to bear witness. 

Yesterday, we visited Louisiana to conduct oversight of two ICE detention facilities in Jena and Basile, where Mahmoud Khalil and my constituent, Rümeysa Öztürk are currently being held. 

I know Rümeysa has become a symbol of the hurt and harm of the Trump administration, but she is a person. 

She is a person and a brilliant scholar, a woman who is a committed community member, someone who was making meaningful contributions to public life and academia in Massachusetts. 

She has asthma, and shamefully, she has not received adequate medical attention that she needs. 

Rümeysa has not committed any crime. She was abducted, kidnapped in broad daylight -simply for co-authoring an op-ed that this White House didn’t like, one that called for the dignity and humanity of every person to be respected. 

Detaining her serves no purpose other than to silence dissent, to stoke and instill fear – which is exactly what a dictator does. 

Similarly, Mahmoud Khalil has not been convicted of any crime. He was simply exercising his right to free speech, something that should be protected and not punished. And now, instead of being home with his wife and their newborn son, he is being unlawfully detained at a facility thousands of miles away from the community he belongs to. 

This is cruel, it is unjust, and it is unacceptable. 

We had the chance to meet with Rümeysa and Mahmoud during our visit, to hear directly from them about their experiences and conditions inside these facilities.

What we saw and heard was harrowing. It was heartbreaking, and it is enraging.

They are being denied proper medical care. They are being deprived of sleep. They are not being fed nutritious meals. Rümeysa herself shared the story of having to wait three days, despite repeated requests, simply for toilet paper. And you can’t even get an extra blanket at night when you are cold.

The cruelty is the point. 

The women that I met are mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, artists, teachers, activists. They are humiliated daily, degraded, and denied the basic necessities of any human being. 

As I said, many of the women there have a history of doing humanitarian work, Rümeysa amongst them. She’s done humanitarian work with refugees, and she told us she was shocked that this sort of facility even existed in the country that she has grown to love – that this could exist in America, the country she loves dearly and has given so much to.

Mahmoud, who has lived in Syria under Assad, knows exactly what authoritarianism looks like, and offered that that is exactly what we are seeing in this moment. This is authoritarianism in Donald Trump’s America.

Despite these horrific experiences, what stood out to me the most about each of them was that their first concern – in fact, their first priority – was not to make appeal for their own respective cases and unique and extreme circumstances, but instead, they put their own well-being, safety, and uncertainty of their future to the side to advocate for those that are detained with them. 

It was the compassion that they felt, the conviction that they walked with. Rümeysa came as someone who is a qualified researcher. She’s been actively listening to and spending time with the women that she is confined with, hearing their stories, and came with copious notes that she had collected. 

Some of the stories she shared with us were stories of women being ripped away from their babies, women with breast cancer who can’t get the care that they need, pregnant women denied prenatal care. When I asked her if anyone she knew had experienced sexual abuse or assault, she told me she did not have the consent to share. 

What Rümeysa and Mahmoud are experiencing isn’t an anomaly. There are hundreds of students just like them who had their visas revoked, and there are millions of people being held in similar conditions in facilities across this country. 

These are private detention centers operated by billion dollar corporations. Like my opposition to private prisons and profiting off of mass incarceration, I vigorously oppose these companies making money on disappearing immigrants. 

As someone who has visited several detention centers throughout my time in Congress, I can tell you that this visit is not about optics. It is about accountability. It is about transparency, and it is about affirming that no one in America – regardless of background, immigration status, political beliefs, and more – should have their constitutional rights to free speech and due process ripped away. 

Before we met with Rümeysa, we went to one of the dorms – as the only woman in our delegation – when I entered, there were 15 women in the door clad in orange scrub outfits, and they just fell into my arms. 

They were desperate and crying and fearful. And they kept asking, they kept saying, ‘I want to talk to you. I want to tell you what’s happening here, but will you protect us when you leave? Who will protect us?’ They were visibly shaking. 

We went to conduct real-time oversight, we went to bear witness. I feel a responsibility to carry the stories that I heard in my heart and for that to inform my strategy and my advocacy. 

Yesterday was a physically and emotionally grueling and depleting day, and it has only strengthened each of our collective resolve to fight for Mahmoud, Rümeysa, and all that are there who question if God has forgotten about them, if the world has forgotten about them. We will not. We cannot.

Today, we’re sending a clear message to Rümeysa, Mahmoud, and everyone who has been harmed or stands to be harmed by this cruel and callous White House that we have not forgotten. We see you, and we are fighting for you every day. 

And we’re sending a message to Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their Republican co-conspirators that Congress is watching, and we will not allow these abuses of power to go unchecked. 

I want to thank Ranking Member Thompson and the House Homeland Security Committee for organizing this trip; Representative Troy Carter for hosting us; my friends and brother colleagues in the Massachusetts delegation, Senator Markey and Congressman McGovern, for showing up in solidarity and in strength. 

This is what it means to conduct real-time congressional oversight. They’re flooding the zone, and so are we. 

We will leverage every single avenue, tool available to us – we will be exhaustive. 

This is what it means to conduct real-time oversight, and this is the type of bold activist leadership that this moment demands. 

We must hold ICE and this hostile, lawless Trump administration accountable. We must protect our democracy and the fundamental rights of everyone who calls America home.

And we must bring Rümeysa and Mahmoud home now.

And with that, I’ll bring to the podium my brother colleague, Congressman McGovern, nationally known for his work in human rights.

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