For months, she’s been haunted by the cries of ICE detention — of scared children, of grieving mothers — and her own.

For over nine months now, I’ve tried to remember a single moment in my life that truly made me scream like I did on March 25, 2025. That was the date masked agents — most of them men — stole me off the sidewalk and the first time I ever screamed out loud. My two-minute scream is forever preserved online, embedded in legal documents and essays written by opinion writers, students, and strangers. It feels unbearably heavy, especially for someone who is always in control and almost never raises their voice.

Many of us keep our emotions at a low volume. We mute them, compartmentalize, and carry on with a distorted sense of control. We read and hear the news like background noise, always telling ourselves, It isn’t me; it won’t happen to me. So we continue in a steady, controlled tone, as if we are the ones engineering the sound of our lives. For over a decade, I traveled around the world, living on my own in different countries for my education. During those years, I held onto a sense of control — of myself, my work, my story — until the day the sound cracked involuntarily. I lost control, felt real fear, and found myself recorded, for the first time, in such a vulnerable state.

After being thrown into the public spotlight against my will, at the darkest moment in my life, the voice in my head, the one that’s been echoing every day since, tells me, You’ve always been calm your whole life; why could you not stay calm at that moment? One should never lose control like that.
I replay the moment’s intensity often: my body trembling, my voice shaking, their hands on me, not knowing what was happening or who they were, only that something was terribly wrong. My chest felt tight, I remember. Did I scream so my mother — thousands of miles away on the phone — could hear my distress? Somehow, mothers find solutions. I asked her to call my friend, not knowing why, only that I needed help. I don’t know if she heard me or if the people who grabbed me hung up before my mother could even hear. My voice sounded shattered, shrinking. Every part of what happened to me was terrifying, and my scream was justified — I keep reminding myself of this.

I was unlawfully detained for co-authoring a school-newspaper op-ed in The Tufts Daily seeking to affirm the equal dignity and humanity of all people, and urging the university to listen to its undergraduate-student body in the democratic resolutions passed by the Tufts Community Union Senate, including acknowledging the Palestinian genocide. For this, I was taken off the street and flown thousands of miles away to a privately run ICE prison in Louisiana.

That day, my neighbor heard me, and because of footage from nearby cameras, so did people around the world. I learned later that, within hours, my scream had made national and international headlines. It was not a conscious choice to make that sound; it came from that place of fear. During my unlawful detention, I repeatedly saw snippets of that moment, what I call the “scream video.” I watched news anchors and pundits talking about the Tufts international Ph.D. student from Turkey and her scream. Over the months since, I’ve read media coverage, essays, and court reports that describe how many people in the United States were terrified and felt silenced after seeing less than two minutes of the “scream video.” Just those two minutes were enough for people to understand the horror of what happened to me that day. Even with the heavy censorship of media in for-profit prisons, the video found its way onto screens. Women gathered around the TV inside the cell, straining to hear through poor-quality headphones. The sound was so faint they could hardly make out the words. They’d look at me, then at the TV, and say, “It’s you.” A part of me was still screaming inside.

Media representation is one of the central focuses of my scholarly work; I know the literature like the back of my hand, but I never imagined I would one day be the subject, the victim. Academic literature indicates how minorities are often underrepresented. And when they are represented, they are reduced to narrow, stereotypical, harmful images in the media. As I watched, all those papers I read were made real. As more and more people kept talking on an old TV screen inside the cell, my inner scream grew louder: This is how it happens in practice. Academia is only one step in learning; it’s lived experience that turns up the volume, revealing the full, deafening extent of harm inflicted on BIPOC and immigrant communities.

As an international student, I always worked hard to make my family believe that everything was fine so they could rest easy at night. I sent them cheerful photos — with friends, in nature, or of something I’d baked — and shared only positive stories. Stories of gatherings, reading, and walks. I avoided mentioning the difficulties of my Ph.D. journey: the many early mornings, the disappointments, some microaggressions, and the heartbreaks. I did not tell them about the countless loud, anonymous verbal attacks that had become an inevitable part of being a visibly Muslim woman in America. I did not tell them how much I missed them, especially their voices: my father’s laughter at his own dad jokes; my mom’s loving call to come downstairs for breakfast; my grandpa’s renditions of famous songs from the first movies he watched in the 1950s; my grandma’s voice sharing recipes with her trademark “eyeball estimate”; and my bird’s cheerful chirping. I was unable to comfort them with my own — they were unable to sleep for almost two months, miles away, worrying nonstop for their daughter and granddaughter.

A woman’s instinct, when someone suddenly claims the right to touch her body, is to scream. This reflex is deeply rooted, not always consciously taught but borne from generations of collective memory shaped by male violence across geographies and time. Our scream is individual and collective, and it is a response to the loss of autonomy, to the violation of consent, to being treated as an object by unfamiliar hands. But our bodies are not objects for men’s touch without consent. Even when fear paralyzes us, we summon our remaining strength to scream, hoping someone will come to our aid.
I screamed, but it wasn’t just my own voice that was crying out.

It was also the silenced voices of thousands of immigrants grabbed off the street, subject to invasive searches at the border, and detained for years in for-profit prisons. It’s the cry of countless people grieving in the “Black Hole” day and night. In that shameful for-profit prison, I remember hearing women weeping everywhere — in medical lines, in dorms, on the phone, in the dining hall — because of medical ignorance, missing their children, miscarriages, lingering court trials for months and months, and the sheer truth of our ongoing dehumanization. My scream is bound to the decades-old cries of Palestinian women. Even in the face of genocide, countless people still find the strength to speak and share their stories, inviting us to listen, recognize our shared humanity, and see that they simply wanted to live. I know how hard it is to bring words together in a sentence under such oppressive power.

During my 45 days in for-profit ICE prison, I collected stories from the other women detained with me: I think of the cry of a gentle mother of two whom I met in the for-profit prison where I was unlawfully kept in Louisiana. She told me how she was ambushed by immigration agents on a playground, her kids watching in terror and tears as she was taken. Another friend told me of an invasive search at the border, and the shame in her silent scream has fused to my own. My scream echoes the pain of immigrant children whose parents are brutally taken from them with anonymous hands. Having spent many of my young-adult years in the USA, I find my inner voice screaming in response to what I know, live, and observe. What I experienced — and what the women I met experienced — “can’t be real.” But another voice shouts back at full volume: It is real; you just didn’t experience this alternative dark universe until now.

After being released from the unlawful detention at the for-profit ICE prison, I watched the “scream video” only once, holding a friend’s hand in tears. I was terrified for the woman with her school backpack in the footage. When I heard the scream in the video, an echo of it escaped my own mouth, my heart pounding: She must be terrified. Then I realized — the person in the video was me.

Whose screams do we choose to hear? Which women’s bodies are protected from the harm of hands and from shame? Which screams go unacknowledged? Unheard. Unrecorded. No witnesses. These are the screams echoing from wounds unhealed. Now, they echo in my head alongside my own.

Months later, I still wake up in tears, haunted by the cries of the women I met in detention. In my dreams, I’m back at that ugly long table in the for-profit ICE prison in Basile, Louisiana. The officers still shout to dictate where one can sit, depending on their wishes. Why do they have to be that loud and harsh? One should never raise their voice. A mother who escaped the war in another country sits across from me, still crying, her tears falling into the uneatable beans. She stirs them with her spoon, folding in her longing for her young children, her grief, her desperation. I try to calm her, but the dinner will not be eaten, not today. When I wake, I can still hear the wrenching scrape of a plastic spoon against a plastic tray. In my nightmares, that single, piercing moment of “the scream” holds me captive — I relive it again and again, straining to cry out with the last bit of strength in my frozen body.

Everything that caused that scream tries to drown out all the beauty I’ve offered to the world with open hands and my voice — my work with children and youth, my teaching, my dreams, my future. It attempts to silence immigrants, academics, BIPOC communities, and those advocating for Palestinian human rights. With others witnessing and understanding what happened, I feel heard and some hope. I know that speaking up is essential to prevent people from ending up in a state of screaming fear. I try to do this through my voice, through my writing. Because my scream is not about me, it is bigger than me — it is about us.