On Tuesday, ICE agents arrested a PhD student at Tufts University, a private university in Massachusetts, an arrest that appears to be part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestine speech.
Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish citizen in the US on an F-1 student visa, was arrested outside of her apartment and is now in federal custody. Her lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai, said she has not been able to contact her.
“We are unaware of her whereabouts and have not been able to contact her. No charges have been filed against Rumeysa to date that we are aware of. We hope Rumeysa will be released immediately,” Khanbabai said.
Khanbabi said that “based on patterns we are seeing across the country, her exercising her free speech rights appear to have played a role in her detention,” referring to the targeting of foreign students who are critical of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
Ozturk has been targeted by the Canary Mission, a pro-Israel group that doxxes students and professors who are critical of Israel. The Canary Mission’s page on Ozturk lists only one example of her “anti-Israel activism,” the co-authoring of an op-ed that called for Tufts University to divest from Israel and “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide.”
According to The New York Times, Tuft administrators were notified that Ozturk’s visa has been revoked and said they weren’t given a reason.
“If ICE detained Ozturk based on her op-ed or activism, it’s a worrying escalation in an already fraught environment for college students here on student visas,” Tyler Coward, lead counsel for government affairs at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), said in a statement, according to the Times.
Ozturk is being held at a detention facility in Louisiana despite an order from a judge that she shouldn’t have been moved out of Massachusetts.
