U.S. immigration authorities have detained and revoked the visa of a Turkish doctoral student at a Massachusetts university who had voiced support for Palestinians in Israel’s war in Gaza, a development the state’s attorney general called “alarming.”
A video of Rumeysa Ozturk’s arrest showed masked and plainclothes agents taking the 30-year-old Turkish national into custody near her home in Somerville, Mass., on Tuesday evening. The Tufts University student was heading to meet with friends to break her Ramadan fast, according to her lawyer.
The arrest in the town just northwest of Boston fuelled a large demonstration of hundreds of protesters in Somerville on Wednesday night.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a post on X authorities determined Ozturk “engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.”
“A visa is a privilege not a right,” McLaughlin said.
She did not specify what specific activities were engaged in by Ozturk, a Fulbright Scholar and student in Tufts’ doctoral program for Child Study and Human Development. Ozturk had been in the country on an F-1 visa to study.
Rumeysa ‘spirited away’ by ICE agents, lawyer says
Ozturk co-authored an opinion piece a year ago in the school’s student paper, the Tufts Daily, that criticized the school’s response to calls by students to divest from companies with ties to Israel and to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide.”
“Based on patterns we are seeing across the country, her exercising her free speech rights appears to have played a role in her detention,” said Mahsa Khanbabai, Ozturk’s lawyer. Khanbabai called the claims against Ozturk “baseless” and said people should be “horrified at the way DHS spirited away Rumeysa in broad daylight.”
U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) in President Donald Trump’s administration has detained or sought to detain several foreign-born students who are legally in the U.S. and have been involved in pro-Palestinian protests. The actions have been condemned as an assault on free speech, though the Trump administration argues that certain protests are antisemitic and can undermine U.S. foreign policy.
“Based on what we now know, it is alarming that the federal administration chose to ambush and detain her, apparently targeting a law-abiding individual because of her political views,” Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell said in a statement. “This isn’t public safety, it’s intimidation that will, and should, be closely scrutinized in court.”
Following Ozturk’s arrest, Khanbabai filed a lawsuit late on Tuesday arguing she was unlawfully detained, prompting U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston that night to order ICE to not move Ozturk out of Massachusetts without at least 48 hours notice. Yet by Wednesday night, ICE’s online detainee locator system listed her as being held at an ICE processing centre in Louisiana.
Talwani has given the government until Friday to respond to her order to answer why Ozturk was detained.
Two weeks ago, Ranjani Srinivasan was an international student from India doing graduate work at New York’s Columbia University. She’s now in Canada, having fled immigration authorities who came searching for her after her student visa was suddenly revoked. She spoke to David Common in a Canada-exclusive interview.
Trump and his Secretary of State Marco Rubio in particular have pledged to deport foreign pro-Palestinian protesters, accusing them of supporting Hamas militants, posing hurdles for U.S. foreign policy and of being antisemitic. Trump has disparaged some schools as “infested with radicalism.”
Protesters, including some Jewish groups, say the administration wrongly conflates their criticism of Israel and support for Palestinian rights with antisemitism and support for Hamas.
Wave of controversial detentions
Tufts President Sunil Kumar said in a statement the school had no advance knowledge of the arrest, which he recognized would be “distressing to some members of our community, particularly the members of our international community.”
The Turkish embassy in Washington said in a statement it was in touch with the U.S. State Department, ICE and other authorities about Ozturk’s detention.
Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student in the country legally, was arrested by U.S. immigration agents and faces possible deportation for his involvement in pro-Palestinian protests. It’s one of the first known arrests linked to the Trump administration’s threats against student activists.
Ozturk was taken into custody less than three weeks after Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and lawful permanent resident, was similarly arrested. He is challenging his detention after Trump, without evidence, accused him of supporting Hamas, which Khalil denies.
Federal immigration officials are also seeking to detain a South Korean-born Columbia University student who is a legal permanent U.S. resident and has participated in pro-Palestinian protests, a move blocked by the courts for now.
A Lebanese doctor and assistant professor at Brown University in Rhode Island was denied re-entry to the U.S. this month and deported to Lebanon after the Trump administration alleged that her phone contained photos “sympathetic” to Hezbollah. Dr. Rasha Alawieh said she does not support the militant group but held regard for its slain leader because of her religion.
The Trump administration has also targeted students at Cornell University in New York, Georgetown University in Washington and the University of Alabama.
Government threatens to pull funding from some schools
On March 10, the Department of Education also sent letters to 60 universities and colleges in the U.S. that warned that the administration would not tolerate antisemitic acts and that schools that did risked losing federal government funding.
But nearly one-third — 19 in total — had already resolved earlier complaints or had never been subject to such complaints at all, according to 31 colleges’ responses to Reuters queries, as well as an analysis of publicly available records maintained by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. The seemingly haphazard composition of the list — and the potentially enormous financial implications — raised immediate concerns in the academic community.
Front Burner34:44‘Professors are the enemy’: Trump’s war on higher education
In a 2021 speech entitled ‘The Universities are the enemy,’ Vice President JD Vance laid out a plan for America’s universities saying in part “we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”
Columbia University has become ground zero for the Trump administration’s war on higher education. Following a year of pro-Palestinian protest on campus, Trump revoked $400-million in funding and has instructed federal agents to oversee raids on campus, looking to deport international students and permanent residents that have been involved in protest.
Joseph Howley is a professor at Columbia and joins the show to discuss the last year and a half on campus, at a time students are being hunted, and some feel the university has capitulated to the demands of a hostile government.
For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts [https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts]
“I certainly was hearing confusion from campus leaders whose institutions were named,” said Lynn Pasquerella, president of the advocacy group American Association of Colleges and Universities. “That’s part of the distress that they’re experiencing, because they don’t even know the nature and extent of the allegations against them.”
It wasn’t clear how the Trump administration would conduct its investigation with current staffing constraints, three former attorneys with the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights told Reuters.
Seven of 12 regional offices of the OCR that investigate antisemitism and other discrimination complaints were closed on March 11, as the Trump administration has launched a campaign to slash federal government payrolls that Democrats and unions have characterized as indiscriminate.
A spokesperson from the Education Department did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
