Liberals Have Been Waiting for This Moment Since Trump Took Office. They Need to Act Now.

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For two months, liberals have asked themselves when the widespread, street-scale mobilization to oppose Donald Trump will begin. Maybe the answer is: This week, in Boston.

Thousands of people gathered in the Boston suburb of Somerville on Wednesday night to protest the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts University Ph.D. student who was detained by immigration police on Tuesday. It was a rally that seemed to suggest that opposition to Trump’s authoritarian turn is finally gathering steam—and provided a hint of the conflicts to come as Democrats try to capture momentum from their angry voters.

With just a few hours’ notice, demonstrators filled the grassy hill at the top of Powder House Park. Organizers’ battery-powered amps were no match for the size of the crowd (about 2,500, per police) and the circling helicopters, but the call-and-response chants were loud and clear: Stand up. Fight back. Free Rumeysa, free them all.

For many attendees, this was the first protest they had attended since Trump’s second inauguration, in January. “I feel like she would be here if it happened to anyone else, so I wanted to be here for her,” attendee Teresa Rodriguez, who held a “Free Rumeysa Ozturk” sign, told me. “I was especially chilled by agents putting their masks up. That’s what happens in police states.”

These protesters, many coming straight from work, watched with horror a neighbor’s video of Ozturk being surrounded by masked officers on the sidewalk outside her home. As my colleague Ayman Ismail wrote on Wednesday, the footage has been among the most shocking documents of the new administration’s brazen approach to immigration policing: A Fulbright scholar, in the U.S. legally, snatched off the street by masked men and quickly vanished into a detention facility in Louisiana. Not to mention, after a day of fasting for Ramadan.

The case is similar to that of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate student and green-card holder who was arrested in the lobby of his Manhattan apartment building for his role in leading campus protests last year, though Ozturk’s apparent offense seems even more anodyne: She co-wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper calling for Tufts to divest from Israel. (The Trump administration claims that Ozturk “engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization”; Hamas is not mentioned in the op-ed.)

These circumstances collided to create a big-tent protest in Somerville, with a crowd that looked as if a few trainloads of Boston commuters—Red Sox hats, Patagonia down jackets—had been emptied into a campus Palestine protest. One man in a baseball cap, button-down shirt, and vest looked so out of place I assumed he was a conservative provocateur. In fact, he told me he was one of Ozturk’s neighbors, and he felt as if her disappearance was an attack on the block he’s lived on his whole life: “There were immigrants in every house. It’s what made the neighborhood worth living in.”

In that sense, the gathering recalled the outraged energy of the Muslim-ban protests at American airports in January 2017, when the country’s liberals portrayed themselves as the patriotic defenders of immigrants and the Constitution. The wry signs were back. “Stop Doing Evil Shit.” “You can’t bring hell to Boston. It’s been here waiting for you.” One attendee had even brought her sign from 2017, a verse from Leviticus in English and in Hebrew: “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them.”

Of course, much has changed since 2017. Many of Wednesday’s protesters were not yet in high school then, and the brutal response to last year’s campus protests has changed tactics. In 2017 Democratic officials took the mic; last night, one speaker noted derisively that sharing the ICE-watch hotline at the protest had done more to protect Boston than all its Democratic representatives put together. In 2017 the media was part of the resistance; last night, organizers beseeched attendees with the hard-won message discipline of campus protests: “Do not talk to the press.” Many attendees wore masks, and the Tufts undergrads who spoke did so with kaffiyehs wrapped around their faces, as if they were riding in the Paris-Dakar.

More substantively, while the protest was over Ozturk’s “state-sanctioned political kidnapping,” as one organizer put it, it was also a continuation of the cause she endorsed in her op-ed: an end to Israel’s war in Gaza. Organizers from the Palestinian Youth Movement led the crowd in the “From the river to the sea,” chant, which has divided Democrats and divided attendees too. “We’ll be able to resist this repression of free speech if we stay united,” one man, who did not join in, told me. “You don’t have to agree with everything a speaker says. The point is to keep speech free—and dissent is patriotic.” Or, as a student with an American flag and a “Jews 4 Civil Liberties” sign said of the chant: “I don’t love sharing a foxhole with them. But you’d like there to be a big tent for the extraordinary rendition of journalists.” By which he meant Rumeysa Ozturk, who was abducted seemingly for a newspaper column.

Sharing the stage with Palestinian advocates has been a minefield for Democratic politicians, even when the message is far less controversial. The issue reflects a bigger problem for the party. Between Democrats’ discomfort with pro-Palestine advocacy and their poll-tested reluctance to discuss immigration, they have struggled to find traction in discussing the president’s actions that have most disgusted their base: the “Palestine exception” to free speech that has given Trump license to imprison immigrants and the deportation of Venezuelans to an El Salvadoran prison based on their tattoos. In 2017 airport protests actually changed public opinion on the Muslim ban, convincing people that the policy was un-American. What does a 2025 equivalent look like, in a party whose leaders can barely summon a full-throated defense of Mahmoud Khalil—let alone share the stage with “From the river to the sea” at a protest?

Powder House Park was a convenient place to pitch a big tent, since it sits between the Tufts campus and the liberal yard signs of Somerville, where Ozturk lived. But it was also a potent bit of symbolism. At the top of the hill is a stone turret, the eponymous powder house, where the British army arrived in 1774 to seize a stock of gunpowder. News of the seizure sent thousands of colonial militia men into the streets—a powerful show of discontent and a “dress rehearsal” for the following year’s battles of Lexington and Concord.

Once again, Somerville is sounding the alarm.