What’s New
In an apparent first, a university has publicly defended one of its international students who became wrapped up in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
On Wednesday, Tufts University filed a declaration in court supporting Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish Ph.D. student who was arrested last week by plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. A video of the arrest, showing officers putting Öztürk in an unmarked car, was circulated widely online.
The Tufts declaration, signed by its president, Sunil Kumar, stated that Öztürk had not violated any campus policies, and called for Öztürk to “receive the due process rights to which she is entitled” and to be “released without delay” from the Louisiana detention center where she is being held. At Tufts, one in five graduate students are international students.
The federal government has ramped up visa revocations in the name of combating antisemitism, and has sought to tie pro-Palestinian protesters directly to terrorist organizations like Hamas. While the reason for Öztürk’s visa revocation and arrest are still unclear, Öztürk’s lawyers have tied it to an opinion essay she co-authored a year ago in the campus newspaper, in which she criticized the university’s response to the war in Gaza.
The opinion piece was allowed under university free-speech policy, according to Kumar. “The university has no information to support the allegations that she was engaged in activities at Tufts that warrant her arrest and detention,” Kumar wrote.
The Details
Öztürk was on her way to a Ramadan dinner on March 25 when ICE officers, some wearing masks and dark sweatshirts, surrounded her on the street just outside her Somerville, Mass., home. That’s according to a March 28 civil lawsuit filed against the Trump administration, which is separate from her deportation case.
Later, she was moved from Massachusetts to an ICE detention center in Louisiana. A federal judge temporarily blocked her deportation.
Neither university officials nor Öztürk received notice that her visa had been revoked before ICE arrested her, according to court documents. At the time of the arrest, Kumar wrote in the declaration, Öztürk was still in good immigration standing. Faculty said she was a hard-working student, and she was in good academic and administrative standing at Tufts.
“The Tufts declaration is a very helpful and important part of the record in that it demonstrates that she is a student in good standing and that she is well-loved and supported by the university community,” Mahsa Khanbabai, Öztürk’s lawyer, wrote in an email to The Chronicle.
According to court documents, Öztürk’s friends, family, and lawyers couldn’t contact her for more than 24 hours after the arrest, and ICE didn’t respond to lawyers’ requests for her location.
Canary Mission, a right-wing website that says it aims to document people and groups who criticize Israel, also posted a profile and photo of Öztürk, linking her to anti-Israel activism after the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas. The profile included details about the classes Öztürk taught and her educational background, which “caused Rümeysa to fear for her safety,” according to court documents.
At least three international students targeted for deportation in the past month were singled out on the Canary Mission website.
The Backdrop
President Trump in January threatened to remove international students who had participated in campus Gaza protests. A White House fact sheet accompanying Trump’s executive order warned: “We will find you, and we will deport you.”
Since then, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the administration has rescinded more than 300 student and visitor visas.
A handful of the arrests garnered widespread attention. In early March, ICE took into custody Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student of Palestinian descent and a legal permanent resident who helped lead Gaza protests on the Columbia campus last spring. A few days later, Ranjani Srinivasan, a Columbia student from India, chose to leave the country after discovering her student visa had been revoked; ICE agents had come to her apartment door.
The Trump administration revived a little-used provision of immigration law that allows the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security to remove visa-holders deemed a national-security risk.
Deporting international students and scholars is a legally murky area. The government is allowed to revoke visas for nearly any reason. (Rubio said in social-media posts and media appearances that participating in pro-Palestinian protests — which he called “pro-terror riots” in a post on X — is cause enough for revocation.) But revoking a visa doesn’t automatically mean a person has to leave the country, according to legal experts.
The Stakes
As ICE activity on campuses has increased, officials at Tufts and other institutions have reported they weren’t aware of changes to students’ immigration status before arrests happened or visas were revoked.
That was the case for two Minnesota students arrested by ICE last week: one at Minnesota State University at Mankato, and another at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. (The University of Minnesota student was taken into custody because of a previous DUI and not for participation in protests, officials said. It’s unclear why the MSU-Mankato student was arrested.)
MSU-Mankato’s president, Edward S. Inch, said in a Wednesday campuswide email that the Department of Homeland Security had revoked five international students’ visas so far. That, too, was a surprise; the university only realized the change after its international office ran a status check.
“These are troubling times,” Inch wrote in the email, “and this situation is unlike any we have navigated before.”
