Defending Student Deportations, Marco Rubio Equates Writing an Anti-Israel Op-Ed With Starting a Riot
President Donald Trump says he is determined to deport “terrorist sympathizers,” including legal permanent residents as well as foreigners with student visas. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the targets have a history of “tearing things up” on “our university campuses” by starting riots, taking over buildings, and harassing people.
While those descriptions seem accurate as applied to at least some of the foreign students whom Rubio wants to expel, they are less apt in other cases. Contrary to the way Trump and Rubio portray this initiative, neither rhetorical support for terrorism nor disruptive conduct is necessary to invoke the sweeping legal authority on which they are relying, which applies to any noncitizen whose “presence or activities” Rubio thinks could have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”
The contrast between Momodou Taal, a British-Gambian graduate student at Cornell University, and Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University, illustrates the startling breadth of that provision. Taal, who is challenging his deportation and so far has avoided detention, has explicitly endorsed terrorism as a form of justifiable “resistance” and has engaged in disruptive protests. But neither seems to be true of Ozturk, who was arrested last week on the street in Somerville, Massachusetts, by masked immigration agents and is being held at a detention center in Louisiana.
On the day of the barbaric attack that set off the war in Gaza, Taal offered a take that was shockingly common among campus protesters who blamed Israeli policy for the Hamas invasion. “Wherever you have oppression, you will find those who [are] fighting against it,” Taal wrote on X. “Glory to the Resistance!” Two days later, he reiterated that “colonised peoples have the right to resist by any means necessary.”
Last year, Taal was suspended twice because of his involvement in disruptive protest activities at Cornell: a pro-Palestinian encampment on the Arts Quad and the forcible invasion of a career fair at Statler Hall. After the second suspension, Taal said he was “effectively being deported.” But he was ultimately allowed to continue working on a Ph.D. in Africana studies, albeit remotely.
Ozturk’s main offense, by contrast, seems to be co-authoring a March 2024 op-ed piece in The Tufts Daily. The essay, which was co-written by three other graduate students, criticized Tufts President Sunil Kumar’s “wholly inadequate and dismissive” response to three anti-Israel resolutions passed by the Tufts Community Union Senate. The resolutions demanded that the university “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide,” stop the sale of Sabra products in Tufts dining facilities, and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel. A fourth resolution, which failed on a tie vote, would have demanded an end to study-abroad programs at Israeli universities.
Those resolutions “disappointed” Kumar, who explained his position in a message to Tufts students, faculty, and staff:
As we have done in the past, we reject the Boycott Divestment Sanctions [BDS] movement, we wholeheartedly support academ
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