Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national who had endorsed Palestinians who were affected by the Gaza war, was detained and denied on Tuesday by US authorities.
Ozturk’s arrest is the latest instance of , President Donald Trump’s administration acting against international college students over their support for Palestinians during the Gaza solidarity encampments that erupted across university campuses last year. Students who fought for Palestine are being detained and detained, and their legal visas and residence status have been suspended.
Here is more about the US university students who have been detained so far:
Trump wants to deport US students, but why?
The Trump administration alleges that the students who participated in pro-Palestine protests spread anti-Semitism and pro-Hamas sentiment on campus — a claim students, lawyers and activists have all rebutted. Many of the most well-known US protests against the Gaza war have involved Jewish activists and organizations.
On January 29, Trump signed an executive order titled “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism”, in which he ordered the head of each executive department or agency to submit a report within 60 days on all criminal and civil authorities and actions available for fighting anti-Semitism.
A day later, the White House released a fact sheet. In the fact sheet, Trump said: “To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I’ll also immediately revoke all Hamas sympathizers’ student visas on college campuses, which have experienced unprecedented radicalism.
His administration has since targeted multiple international students and scholars in the US.
Rumeysa Ozturk
Security camera footage from Tuesday evening shows six individuals in plainclothes taking Ozturk into custody near her apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts. Some of these police officers had their faces partially covered. Ozturk had headed out alone to meet her friends for Iftar, the evening meal to break her Ramadan fast.
The 30-year-old is a Fulbright Scholar in Tufts’ doctoral program for Child Study and Human Development and a Turkish national. She has been in the US on a valid student visa.
Ozturk and four other students wrote an opinion piece for the Tufts Daily, her university’s student news website, on March 26, 2024. In this piece, the authors criticised the institute’s President Sunil Kumar, who sent an email dismissing resolutions passed by the Tufts Community Union Senate, which called for the university to divest from companies linked to Israel and “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide”.
Late on Tuesday, Ozturk’s attorney, Mahsa Khanbabai, filed a petition in Boston federal court alleging that he had been detained without authorization. As a result, US District Judge Indira Talwani ordered US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) not to move Ozturk out of Massachusetts without 48 hours notice.
Despite this, Ozturk’s lawyer claims that she was moved to Louisiana by Wednesday night.
US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin wrote in an X post on Wednesday: “DHS + ICE investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans”. What these activities were, according to McLaughlin, was not specified.
“A visa is a privilege not a right. The visa issuance process must end in the event that you support and glorify terrorists who murder Americans. This is commonsense security”, McLaughlin wrote.
We have not been able to contact her because we are not aware of her whereabouts. No charges have been filed against Rumeysa to date that we are aware of”, Khanbabai said in a statement.
Sunil Kumar, president of Tufts University, claimed in a written statement that the institution had not been informed prior to this arrest. “From what we have been told subsequently, the student’s visa status has been terminated, and we seek to confirm whether that information is true”, Kumar said.
Software engineer Michael Mathis, 32, captured the video of Ozturk’s arrest on his security camera. “It looked like a kidnapping”, he said, according to a report by AP. They turn around and begin to grab her while covering their faces. They’re covering their faces. They are in unmarked vehicles.
On Wednesday, hundreds of people gathered in Somerville to protest the arrest of Ozturk, demanding her release.
Standing with thousands of Somerville residents to protest the vile, obscene abduction of Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk by masked federal agents last night. We need to bring Rumeysa home and organize a coordinated defense of our immigrant neighbors and our rights. pic . twitter.com/LSGLLlraIi
Mahmoud Khalil
On March 8, ICE agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate who was the lead negotiator for Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) during the campus protests last year. He was taken from his university-owned New York City apartment while his wife, Noor Abdalla, who is eight months pregnant, recorded the arrest on her phone. This marked the first publicly known student deportation effort of its kind under the Trump administration.
McLaughlin alleged Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization”, but no evidence for this was provided. Abdalla claimed that the agents conducted the arrest without a warrant. Khalil was transferred to an ICE processing facility in Jena, Louisiana.
Khalil was a permanent resident with a green card at the time of his arrest. When the ICE agents were told that Khalil had a green card, they said that this would be revoked. The link to a news article about Khalil’s arrest was provided by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who wrote, “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”
On March 10, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform: “Following my previously signed Executive Orders, ICE proudly apprehended and detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student on the campus of Columbia University.” Trump added that Khalil’s arrest was the first of many. “We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again,” Trump wrote, without offering any evidence to back his accusations against Khalil.
Khalil, 30, was born in a Syrian refugee camp as an Algerian. He arrived at Columbia in January 2023 to pursue his Master’s degree in public administration. Five days after Israel’s first war with Gaza broke out, Khalil was one of the students who organized the first campus protest.
Amid the protests, Khalil was briefly suspended by Columbia, but reinstated after the university found no grounds for suspension. Khalil claimed at the time that he did not participate in the camps because he was concerned about losing his F-1 student visa while serving as the lead negotiator.
It is unclear when he received his green card, but his wife, Abdalla, is a US citizen.
In a court filing on March 13, Khalil’s attorneys, led by Amy Belsher, wrote in a statement on March 13 that the government’s unlawful policy of pursuing noncitizens for arrest and detention violates the First Amendment.
Badar Khan Suri
Indian national Badar Khan Suri was arrested on the evening of March 17 at his home in northern Virginia. At Georgetown University’s Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Suri is a postdoctoral fellow. He had been in Virginia for three years and held a valid US student visa at the time of arrest.
We have not been given a reason for Suri’s detention, according to a written statement from Georgetown University: “We are not aware of him engaging in any illegal activity.”
McLaughlin attributed Suri’s arrest to his “spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism”. She stated on X: “Suri has close ties to a well-known or suspected terrorist who is a senior advisor to Hamas.”
Suri’s wife, Mapheze Saleh, is an American citizen, she confirmed to Al Jazeera. Saleh was the daughter of a senior Hamas adviser, according to a post on X on February 13. Ahmed Yousef, a former adviser to assassinated Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, confirmed to The New York Times that he is Suri’s father-in-law.
However, there is no proof that Suri organized anti-Semitism or spread Hamas propaganda.
On March 20, Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles of the Eastern District of Virginia Court halted Suri’s deportation. Suri is currently being held in Alvarado, Texas, according to the ICE website.
Yunseo Chung
Yunseo Chung, 21, is a Korean-American Columbia student and permanent resident of the US and has lived in the US since she was seven. Chung was one of the several students arrested for participating in a pro-Palestine protest on March 5 this year at Barnard College, a Columbia-affiliated undergraduate college.
She was prevented from deporting by filing a lawsuit against the Trump administration in the Southern District of New York on Monday.
Her legal team was informed early this month that her permanent residence was being revoked, according to the court filing. According to the lawsuit, Chung was the subject of an administrative arrest warrant issued on March 8.
On Tuesday, US District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald temporarily halted her deportation. “As of today, Yunseo Chung no longer has to fear and live in fear of ICE coming to her doorstep and abducting her in the night,” Chung’s lawyer Ramzi Kassem said after the ruling.
Momodou Taal
At Cornell University, Momodou Taal is pursuing a doctoral dissertation in Africana studies. He is a dual citizen of the United Kingdom and The Gambia. He called on Cornell to stop buying weapons from organizations that sell weapons to Israel last year while organizing pro-Palestine protests. Taal was suspended from Cornell twice last year for his participation in protest activities and encampment.
After Khalil was detained, Taal told Al Jazeera that he had filed a lawsuit against two Trump executive orders, including one aimed at university campuses, along with two other plaintiffs who are both US citizens: a doctoral candidate and a professor from Cornell.
On the morning of March 19, a day after a federal judge scheduled a hearing for Taal’s lawsuit, Taal posted a written statement on X that “unidentified law enforcement” came to his home in Ithaca, New York. He added that Cornell students later observed additional law enforcement vehicles parked nearby, including on the campus.
Citing the example of Ozturk’s arrest, Taal said that there seems to be an emerging pattern, “You are surveilled for a few days and then they pounce essentially to abduct you and kidnap you at some point”.
Taal claimed on March 14 that his visa was suspended.
Alireza Doroudi
Alireza Doroudi, a mechanical engineering doctoral student at the University of Alabama, was detained by ICE agents early on Tuesday, the university’s student news website, The Crimson White, reported. While the ICE website says that an Iranian individual named Alireza Doroudi is in ICE custody, it does not specify where he is being detained.
Doroudi, who was Iranian, obtained an F-1 student visa from the US Embassy in Oman in January 2023. His visa was revoked six months after his arrival in the US, The Crimson White reported, citing a group chat that included Iranian students. He was detained for overstaying a visa, but it’s not clear whether that’s the case.
University spokesperson Alex House said that, while international students are valued members of the campus community, the university “has and will continue to follow all immigration laws and cooperate with federal authorities”.
Ranjani Srinivasan
Ranjani Srinivasan, 37, had her student visa revoked by the US Department of State on the night of March 5. She received an email from the US consulate in Chennai, the state where she is a native of. She had been a PhD candidate in urban planning at Columbia University for five years and held a valid visa until 2029.
On March 7, unauthorized immigrants knocked on Srinivasan’s university residence hall apartment, which she had resided in since 2021. The individuals said that they planned to put Srinivasan through proceedings to remove her from the US, before eventually leaving.
After that, Srinivasan moved out of her apartment to a place she had not previously disclosed to Al Jazeera. A day after this, Khalil was arrested. When I realized that I had absolutely no rights in this system, I did. It was only a matter of time before they caught hold of me”, Srinivasan told Al Jazeera. “Casino already knew ICE was operating on campus, but it seemed uninterested in intervening and even appeared to be colluding with them before Mahmoud disappeared,” said Columbia.
On March 9, Columbia unenrolled Srinivasan as a student. Srinivasan left New York for Canada on a visitor visa by March 11 to spend time with her family and friends. Her lawyers informed ICE that Srinivasan had departed from the US.
On March 14, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem posted a video of Srinivasan, who was enthralled about “one of the Columbia University terrorist sympathizers” leaving on their own, on a video posted on her X account.
Srinivasan was stunned at the accusation. Anyone in my immediate vicinity who doesn’t have done anything can just be picked up and made an example of, she said, according to Al Jazeera, if supporting the idea of human rights or ending a genocide is equated with doing Hamas.
Source: Aljazeera
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