Reuters – United States immigration authorities detained a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University near Boston who had voiced support for Palestinians during Israel’s war in Gaza and have revoked her visa.
Rumeysa Ozturk’s supporters say her detention is the first known immigration arrest of a Boston-area student engaged in such activism to be carried out by President Donald Trump’s administration, which has detained or sought to detain several foreign-born students who are legally in the US 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 US foreign policy. The 30-year-old Turkish national was taken into custody near her home in Somerville, Massachusetts, on Tuesday evening while she was heading to meet with friends to break her Ramadan fast, according to her lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai.
US Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin in a post on X said 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 activities. But her arrest came a year after Ozturk co-authored an opinion piece in the school’s student paper, the Tufts Daily, that criticized Tuft’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 appear to have played a role in her detention,” Khanbabai said.
Following Ozturk’s arrest, Khanbabai filed a lawsuit late Tuesday arguing she was unlawfully detained, prompting US District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston that night to order US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to not move Ozturk out ofa Massachusetts without at least 48 hours notice. Despite the judge’s order, by Wednesday afternoon, Khanbabai in a motion said she had been unable to locate her client in New England and had just been informed by a US senator’s office that Ozturk was transferred to Louisiana.
