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Rumeysa Oziuk, a Turkish student was detained on Tuesday evening in Somerville, Mass., outside of Boston.
CBC reports that she was accosted by masked and plainclothes agents in the latest Trump administration action against a foreign student who had voiced support for Palestinians in Israel’s war in Gaza.
Her arrest came a year after Oztuc, a Fulbright Scholar and student in Tufts’ doctoral program for Child Study and Human Development, co-authored an opinion piece in the school’s student paper, the Tufts Daily. The piece criticized the school’s response to calls by students to divest from companies with ties to Israel and to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide.”
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 the Trump 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 process.
The actions have been condemned as an assault on free speech. The Trump administration has however argued that certain protests are antisemitic and can undermine US foreign policy.
Following her arrest, Ozturk’s lawyer filed a lawsuit arguing her detention was unlawful. A federal judge in Boston on Tuesday night ordered US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to refrain from moving Ozturk out of Massachusetts without 48 hours notice. But the US Department of Justice in a filing on Thursday said that she was now in Louisiana and had been detained outside of Massachusetts at the time the lawsuit was filed.
Another student, Ranjani Srinivasan from India fled to Canada two weeks ago to prevent her arrest by American immigration authorities who came looking for her after her student visa was suddenly revoked.
However, the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio derided the protesters as “lunatics’ when asked about the incident. He said the State Department may have revoked more than 300 visas and warned that the Trump administration was looking every day for “these lunatics” after Washington this week detained and revoked the visa of a Turkish student at Tufts University (Ozturk).
