“Can I simply name the police?” the lady requested.
“We’re the police,” one of many masked, plainclothes brokers replied earlier than main her away in handcuffs.
The girl, Rumeysa Ozturk, is a Turkish-born Fulbright scholar learning in a PhD program at Tufts College in Massachusetts. She was on her approach to an Iftar dinner in Somerville on Tuesday when immigration enforcement officers intercepted her on a street corner, put her into an SUV, and took her away. The 30-year-old, who has apparently not been charged with against the law, was transferred to a detention middle in Louisiana, although federal Decide Indira Talwani ordered Tuesday that Ozturk should “not be moved exterior the District of Massachusetts with out first offering advance discover of the meant transfer.”
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Ozturk holds a authorized F-1 visa and was arrested for participating in “actions in assist of Hamas,” the Division of Homeland Safety stated in an announcement. “Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill People is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated,” the DHS stated. However it didn’t say with any specificity what these alleged “actions” had been, and Canary Mission, the pro-Israel group that targeted Ozturk for her assist for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) motion, appeared to level solely to an an op-ed she co-authored final 12 months for the Tufts faculty newspaper as proof of her “anti-Israel activism.”
Ozturk is considered one of a number of foreign-born college college students to be focused in latest weeks as a part of Donald Trump’s crackdowns on each immigration and dissent. In one other high-profile case this month, federal brokers arrested authorized everlasting resident Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia College in New York, the place the Palestinian-born 30-year-old as soon as led protests in opposition to the conflict in Gaza. Khalil was additionally transported to Louisiana.
The detentions are a part of a broader Trump campaign in opposition to what a senior State Division official described as “Hamasniks,” protesters they accuse of supporting the fear group behind the October 7, 2023 assault on Israel. “Everyone seems to be honest recreation,” the official told Axios, describing the administration’s effort to restrict international college students at schools which have too many who’re “pro-Hamas” and to revoke visa-holders who demonstrated in opposition to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conflict.
