The Trump administration confirmed it has arrested a foreign student accused of participating in pro-Hamas activities, the latest in a string of crackdowns against alleged extremists on university campuses.
Rumesya Ozturk, a Turkish national currently attending Tufts University, was apprehended by immigration authorities on Tuesday just outside of Boston, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation. Like many of the other foreign students arrested before her, Ozturk had been a vocal anti-Israel activist while studying in the U.S. and was profiled by a watchdog that tracks anti-Semitism.
“Rumesya Ozturk is a Turkish national and Tufts University graduate student, granted the privilege to be in this country on a visa,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement provided to the DCNF. “DHS and [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.”
“A visa is a privilege not a right. Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated,” McLaughlin continued. “This is commonsense security.”
Tufts University, a private research university in the Boston metro area, was among the many schools that were swept by anti-Israel protests throughout 2024. A “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” where protesters lingered in tents and hung pro-Palestinian signs, lasted for nearly a month on the school’s campus before it finally dissipated.
Ozturk was one of the students involved in the activism. An op-ed she co-authored in March 2024 demanded the Tufts divest from all companies with “direct or indirect” ties to Israel and compared Israel to apartheid-era South Africa. Her op-ed made no mention of the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas militants that killed roughly 1,200 people that sparked the current war in the region.
Canary Mission, a group that tracks alleged anti-Semitic actors in the U.S., has since included her in their database. Video footage taken by an onlooker shows several immigration officials stopping and detaining Ozturk on Tuesday while she was walking down a street in Somerville, Massachusetts, not far from her campus.
In a public statement released Wednesday, Tufts University President Sunil Kumar said Ozturk is currently being held in Louisiana. However, her name was not located Thursday in a search of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) inmate database.
Although she has been arrested, Ozturk cannot be deported just yet, according to court documents. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani of Boston, an appointee of President Barack Obama, ordered she not be moved out of Massachusetts after her lawyers filed a lawsuit arguing she was wrongfully detained.
Under U.S. law, a foreign national does not need to be convicted or charged of a crime to be removable from the country. The State Department has the authority to revoke the legal status of any non-citizen deemed a potential threat to U.S. foreign policy — an authority that has been increasingly applied to a number of foreign student protesters accused of Hamas sympathies, according to immigration experts.
Mahmoud Khalil, a Syrian-born Algerian national who became the face of the anti-Israel protests at Columbia University in 2024, was arrested by DHS agents earlier in March. The Trump administration has since revoked his permanent status and is currently attempting to remove him out of the U.S., but his legal team is fighting his deportation.
Immigration authorities arrested Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian from the West Bank, earlier in March after her student visa expired and was previously arrested for her alleged participation in a pro-Hamas demonstration at Columbia University. ICE agents also recently arrested Badar Khan Suri, an Indian national who worked as a researcher at Georgetown University campus, whom DHS accuses of spreading Hamas propaganda, promoting anti-Semitism and having close ties to a senior adviser to Hamas.
Law enforcement denied entry and deported Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese national, after Customs and Border Protection discovered she was returning from a funeral for former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and allegedly had numerous adoring pictures of other extremists on her cell phone. Another foreign student protester, Indian national Ranjani Srinivasan, chose to voluntarily leave using Trump’s new self-deportation app after her visa was revoked for alleged pro-Hamas activities.
DHS is also looking to detain Cornell student Momodou Taal, a Gambian national who has repeatedly vilified the U.S. in online posts, and Columbia University student Yunseo Chung, a South Korean national who was previously arrested for her anti-Israel activism in New York City. However, both have preemptively sued the Trump administration in a bid to ward off deportation.
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