On March 25, masked plainclothes federal agents surrounded, seized and handcuffed a Turkish doctoral student named Rumeysa Ozturk near her home outside Boston.
Ozturk, who is enrolled at Tufts University on a valid student visa, was bundled into an unmarked car and shipped to an immigration detention center in Louisiana.
Authorities claim, without offering evidence, that Ozturk “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” But her principle offense appears to be co-authoring an opinion essay criticizing Tufts's response to the war in Gaza.
The video footage of the arrest was shocking but, these days, not surprising. During the 2024 presidential campaign, President Trump repeatedly threatened to crack down on campus protesters. Last May, he told campaign donors that “any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.”
Shortly after taking office, Trump announced, “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests ... we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”
Last month, Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student with a green card and a pregnant American wife, was the first detained and threatened with deportation. He was accused, apparently without evidence, of ties to Hamas.
Other students and researchers at Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Georgetown, the University of Alabama and elsewhere have subsequently been targeted for deportation because they posed unspecified “national security concerns.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio estimates he has revoked more than 300 visas of students and other international visitors whose activities “are counter ... to our foreign policy.” “Every time I find one of these lunatics,” ...
