Rumeysa Ozturk’s Op-Ed Is Still the Only Public Justification for Her Arrest
When immigration agents grabbed Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk off the street near her home in Somerville, Massachusetts, on March 25, it looked like her only crime was cowriting an anti-Israel op-ed that had appeared in the school newspaper a year earlier. It still looks that way a month later, despite the government’s vague allusions to additional evidence supporting Ozturk’s removal from the United States.
“It is unthinkable that a person in a free society could be snatched from the
street, imprisoned, and threatened with deportation for expressing an opinion the
government dislikes,” the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) says in a brief it filed on Tuesday in support of Ozturk’s challenge to her treatment. The brief in Ozturk v. Trump, which was joined by the National Coalition Against Censorship, the Rutherford Institute, PEN America, the Cato Institute, and the First Amendment Lawyers Association, notes that Secretary of State Marco Rubio deemed Ozturk deportable “not because the government claims she committed a crime or other deportable offense” but “for the seemingly sole reason that her expression—an op-ed in a student newspaper—stirred the Trump administration to anger.”
Ozturk, a Turkish citizen, was pursuing a Ph.D. in child study and human development at Tufts. Her arrest “doesn’t really make sense, because she wasn’t a figure on campus,” Najiba Akbar, a former Muslim chaplain at Tufts, told The New York Times last month. “I don’t think she was active in banned groups like Students for Justice in Palestine. From what I know, she was doing her thing, doing her Ph.D.”
Although “some Gaza activism on university campuses has involved actions the First Amendment does not immunize, including vandalism, physical violence, and unlawful building occupations,” FIRE notes, “neither the Trump administration nor Tufts [has] alleged Ms. Ozturk engaged in those or any other unlawful actions. To the contrary, the University confirmed that Ms. Ozturk is a student in good standing, that she had followed regulations concerning students on visas, and that the university has no information that she engaged in unlawful conduct warranting her arrest.”
In a March 21 memo explaining the justification for revoking Ozturk’s student visa, a State Department official said the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had determined that she was “involved in associations that ‘may undermine U.S. foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization,’ including [co-authoring] an op-ed that found common cause with an organization that was later temporarily banned from campus.” Note the slippery reasoning, which amounts to guilt by association.
The DHS was referring to Hamas, the terrorist organization that started the war in Gaza by mounting a barbaric attack on southern Israel in October 2023, and (presumably) to Tufts Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which the university suspended last October because of “multiple violations of university policies” during protests against Israel’s response to that invasion. But the DHS did not claim that Ozturk herself had supported Hamas, even rhetorically. It did not even claim that Ozturk was a member of SJP or had been involved in disruptive protest activities. Rather, it averred that she had “found common cause” with SJP, which in turn had expressed support for Hamas.
As evidence of that “common cause,” the DHS cited the op-ed piece that Ozturk published in The Tufts Daily on March 26, 2024. In that essay, Ozturk and three other international students expressed dismay at Tufts President Sunil Kumar’s “wholly inadequate and dismissive” response to three anti-Israel resolutions passed by the Tufts Community Union Senate (TCUS). Those SJP-backed 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.
As Ozturk and her co-authors saw it, the resolutions “were the product of meaningful debate by the Senate and represent a sincere effort to hold Israel accountable for clear violations of international law.” They added that “credible accusations against Israel include accounts of deliberate starvation and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausibl
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