BOSTON — A group of Bay State lawmakers described “harrowing” conditions as they recounted a visit to a Louisiana immigration facility, and they warned that if university students can be detained there without a trial, so can anyone else.

“When the government can imprison people like them — who dissent — without due process in this instance, there is nothing to stop the government from going after you too,” said U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern during a press conference Wednesday.

McGovern’s remarks followed a trip with Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Ayanna Pressley to a U.S. Customs and Immigration Detention Center in Louisiana to visit Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk.

Ozturk’s detention, the group said, violates her rights as legal resident of the United States and a human being.

“What we saw and heard was harrowing. It was heart-breaking, and it is enraging,” Pressley said at a hastily arranged press conference at Logan Airport.

The detained foreign nationals they met with, the congresswoman said, are denied adequate medical care, subjected to sleep deprivation, not well fed, and not routinely provided with basic necessities like toilet paper or blankets to sleep with. Some, she said, openly wondered if the nation and “God has forgotten about them.”

“The cruelty is the point,” Pressley said. “They are humiliated daily, degraded and denied the basic necessities needed by any human being.”

Ozturk, a fifth-year doctoral student studying at Tufts University on a student visa, was apprehended by masked immigration agents in Somerville on March 25. Her arrest came after her visa was revoked over alleged support for Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that students studying in the United States, as Ozturk was, are not invited here to speak out against U.S. policy.

“If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student, and you tell us that the reason you are coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we are not going to give you a visa,” Rubio said in late March.

According to the memo revoking her visa, Ozturk “had been involved in associations that ‘may undermine U.S. foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization’ including coauthoring an op-ed that found common cause with an organization that was later temporarily banned from campus.”

Lawyers for the Turkish national say her allegedly hostile activities amount to an op-ed that “criticized Tufts leadership’s response to the Tufts Community Union Senate passing several resolutions concerning human rights violations in Gaza,” which would under normal circumstances be considered First Amendment protected speech.

Tufts University President Sunil Kumar, said in an early April that the op-ed “was not in violation of any Tufts policies” and that “no complaints were filed with the University or, to our knowledge, outside of the University about this op-ed.” Ozturk remains in good standing, the university said.

Ozturk has not been charged with any crime, and remains in Louisiana even after a judge ordered her not to be removed from Massachusetts in the first place.

According to the lawmakers, she was locked up in Louisiana so that immigration officials could find a more favorable court. The Trump administration has maintained there was not adequate space to house her in New England.

“In Trump’s America, her so-called crime was writing an op-ed in the Tufts Daily newspaper,” Markey said. “This is repression. This is authoritarianism in the Trump era, and Rumeysa is the victim of it.”

According to McGovern, if people don’t stand up for Ozturk and others like her, in short order our children and grandchildren will be afraid to speak their minds for fear of government reprisal. These are not “ordinary times” we’re living through, McGovern said, and if the removal of due process can start with students like Ozturk “it ends with you.”

Now is the time, he continued, for people to stand up and speak out. It’s the time for “courage,” before it’s too late.

“What we witnessed makes me wonder whether we as a country are losing, not only our humanity, but our values, the values that this country was supposed to be built on — freedom of speech, due process under the law, human rights and human dignity — these are not just words, these are the ideas that we’re supposed to live by,” McGovern said.

Last week, a federal judge ordered the government, by May 1, to return Ozturk to Vermont where she was briefly held after her apprehension and where a habeas corpus petition has been filed on her behalf. Jessie Rossman, legal director for the ACLU of Massachusetts, said in a statement that the judge’s order “sent a clear message that any attempt to manipulate the judiciary is simply wrong.”

“Judge (William) Sessions held that the government’s removal of Rumeysa from Vermont to Louisiana violated the spirit of the emergency order from the federal court in Massachusetts. This is a crucial step for upholding the rule of law in our country,” Rossman said.

The Trump administration appealed that ruling on Tuesday and asked for a stay of the return order pending the disposition of their appeal.

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