US immigration agents snatch pro-Palestine PhD student off street in Boston

Agents of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have detained a PhD student in Boston after the administration of President Donald Trump terminated her student visa.

Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University, was arrested in a street in the town of Somerville, Massachusetts, the school's president said in a statement, over expressing pro-Palestine leanings in an article she co-authored. 

In a statement on Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that Ozturk’s student visa was “terminated” due to her alleged “activities in support of” the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, which Washington has designated as a “terrorist organization.”

Her visa “is a privilege not a right,” said the statement, adding that “glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated,” alleged DHS Spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin in an X post, without pointing to any specific evidence of the Turkish national’s alleged “terror” support.

The 30-year-old student and Fulbright Scholar had penned an op-ed article in the student newspaper The Tufts Daily in March 2024, criticizing Tufts’ “wholly inadequate” response of the anti-Israel protests, urging the university to divest from Israel, a key demand of the movement.

Ozturk, a former Columbia University student, was “ambushed” by ICE agents while heading out for dinner with friends from her off-campus apartment, according to a statement from her attorney, Mahsa Khanbabai, provided to the Boston Globe.

A dramatic video, taken by a neighbor's surveillance camera, dated March 25, shows a plainclothes federal agent approaching Ozturk on the street, followed by several other agents surrounding her before she was taken into custody.

One of the agents was seen snatching the phone from her hand, then putting her hands behind her back and handcuffing her.

On Wednesday, hundreds of people gathered at Powder House Park to call for the release of Ozturk.

“The university campus should absolutely be a place for the free and open exchange of ideas and the fact that someone can just be disappeared into the abyss for voicing an idea is absolutely horrifying,” said rally attendee Sam Wachman. 

City leaders in neighboring Medford, where the university is located, joined the rally after seeing the video.

‘I am a political prisoner’: Mahmoud Khalil slams his detention in US after pro-Palestine protests

Mahmoud Khalil says he is a "political prisoner" after being detained by US police for leading pro-Palestine protests.

Khanbabai has submitted a petition to a federal court in Massachusetts, asking for Ozturk’s release from ICE detention.

The move was the latest action taken against a foreign learner associated with pro-Palestinian campus activism in the US as Trump, through a mass deportation effort, keeps cracking down on the movement, which was launched against Israel’s genocidal war on the besieged Gaza Strip.

Earlier this month, Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil said that he was a “political prisoner” targeted to suppress dissent, after being detained by US police for leading pro-Palestine protests.

“I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law,” he said in a statement provided exclusively to British daily The Guardian on March 18.

Khalil issued the statement to rail against the US’s treatment of immigrants in its custody, Israel’s renewed bombardment of the Gaza Strip, US foreign policy, and what he described as Columbia University’s surrender to federal pressure to punish students.

His detention has sparked protests and alarm among free speech advocates, who argue that he is being unlawfully targeted for his activism, with his lawyers contending that the Trump administration is using rarely invoked legal provisions to deport him, although he is not being charged with a crime.

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