Public Comment: None of Us Is Safe When We Prioritize the Rights of Some over Others

This comment is adapted from a public comment offered at the meeting of the Amherst Town Council on February 23, 2026.

One of the early ICE incidents noted in the Resolution Calling for Federal Immigration Agents to be Held Accountable for Violations of Massachusetts Criminal Law was the kidnapping of Rümeysa Öztürk—a Tufts PhD student and student visa holder who was violently detained, called a terrorist, and moved out-of-state to a for-profit detention center, in defiance of court orders—all because she wrote an op-ed in her college newspaper urging Tufts to recognize the US-Israeli genocide of Gaza. She was targeted under the direction of a leader who is willing to violate civil rights in order to suppress dissent. 

If her story sounds familiar, perhaps it is because just one year earlier, our own police force was deployed at the whim of UMass leadership to violently arrestover 130 students and community members exercising their right to peacefully protest UMass’s ties to genocide profiteers. Finding no grounds, the district attorney subsequently dropped all charges.

History has shown that most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. Dehumanization is used to usher in fascist oppression. The whole point is to push the boundaries of what we as a society will allow. And we told them we didn’t care—we’d even lent them our cops. 

This is the point. None of us are safe while we prioritize the rights and value of some humans over others—whether Black, Brown, undocumented, incarcerated, Queer, Transgender, Palestinian, disabled, or voicing dissent.  

What they will do to a child in Gaza, they will do to a 5-year-old seeking asylum in Minnesota. What they will do to a Black American father, they will do to a Queer American mother in an SUV. What they did to Hind Rajab, and Liam Conejo Ramos, and Keith Porter Jr., and Renee Good, and Alex Peretti is what they will do to all of us. 

This resolution is an important step, but it must be one action of many. Those who would give our over-resourced police department all new vehicles but won’t fix the crumbling roof of our middle school have already failed us. It is past time for the council to acknowledge the harm and begin to remedy it, using all of the power this community has vested in it.

Leyla Moushabeck

Leyla Moushabeck is a Palestinian American resident of Amherst, co-owner and editorial director of Interlink Publishing in Northampton, and co-founder of Valley Families for Palestine.